EB

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

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#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

InsaneMcFries

Also crypto bear 

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

rikbona


CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

zoomercoomer9000

Hey, so if you lost money to this: https://i.imgur.com/MEoFOTc.jpg 0x0aE042d2E5826BFBDE038163366f2ae372fe7894 (zjz.eth) Coinbase Customer Deposit Addresses: 1. 0x436A885Bd0c4323C76A5e852c3eF21C5cdD7a583 2. 0x0171F86E22E53f6682D7fF92A78336b8506CB3c9 3. 0x7ab35f73C1824f7854EB2860170217e8A6a52249 4. 0x4242AF4CE9D49f4cC6003dce5Fb7Fb163c09E5F5 5. 0x55e1434DBB36e2aadCfB60A84c7e714f1265CEC0 6. 0x1E8eFCC18506ffE43b9332283Bc5BFF18aF2Dc67 7. 0x7903FD6249a495AE8EE32fbb970BFf66e45f3B53

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is a Solana pro-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

misteryk

Tokens that were not rugged YET: GENSLR - 0xE2dcd7Fec3633987F0679086c9242138e5A23C7E SUI - 0xfA79f5a169d32B70E8a337d25b3660DA34C9AC0F PEPE - 0xEd2C2512E882202eDA73b91319eA58d0db72f743 EDU - 0x4F7Badd58F2c03BE5EB2CFbd7991c7d24cA245a5 DED - 0xfFBEd56c68fc5921DD8fc6a158fDC6666f836fE3 BABYPEPE - 0x438e5c424A1F91bcd7b8a3c0C595B27818D8D726

GroovyIntruder

Here's one in Canada, conveniently located next to the defibrillator and EB Games. https://maps.app.goo.gl/6kqTdcCM6j6vxtnE6

almost-punk

[that's... why i'm here](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/star-wars-memes/images/2/2b/ED6EB569-AE7C-43CB-9BD8-DBCAE488CDDF.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20210410225105)

Evening-Trip2992

Im using Accointing by Glassnode - its very usefull cause u can import nearly every API from brokers. So u have a history of coins . Habe a look at it - im very happy. https://www.accointing.com/discount/2EB-556

mutlucan

More updates from the official Discord announcement: >We’re currently all hands on deck working through identifying all addresses that have been affected by the RouterProcessor2 exploit. Several rescues have been initiated, and we are continuing to monitor / rescue funds as they become available. If you are a user and you have been affected, please check for the output address your funds have gone to. Our whitehat rescue address is 0x74Ebb8e8d0B0cc65F06040EB0f77B5DA0e33fFeE and if you see this as the output address then your funds are currently safe. If you have another address for where your funds went, then please contact us at security@sushi.com w/ the tx hash and chain you were on. We will continue to update everyone as we gather more information, and appreciate everyone working together with us to amend the situation. There is no risk at this time with using Sushi Protocol, and the UI. All exposure to RouterProcessor2 has been removed from the front end, and all LPing / current swap activity is safe to do. We do ask that all users double-check their approvals, and if an address within this list below has an allowance for any of your tokens to please unapprove as soon as you can. Please make use of https://www.sushi.com/swap/approvals to check if you have tokens approved for RouteProcessor2 on any network listed below and revoke the token approvals. Arbitrum Nova -> 0x1c5771e96C9d5524fb6e606f5B356d08C40Eb194 Arbitrum -> 0xA7caC4207579A179c1069435d032ee0F9F150e5c Avalanche -> 0xbACEB8eC6b9355Dfc0269C18bac9d6E2Bdc29C4F Boba -> 0x2f686751b19a9d91cc3d57d90150bc767f050066 Bsc -> 0xD75F5369724b513b497101fb15211160c1d96550 Ethereum -> 0x044b75f554b886A065b9567891e45c79542d7357 Fantom -> 0x3e603C14aF37EBdaD31709C4f848Fc6aD5BEc715 Fuse -> 0x2f686751b19a9d91cc3d57d90150Bc767f050066 Gnosis -> 0x145d82bCa93cCa2AE057D1c6f26245d1b9522E6F Moonbeam -> 0x1838b053E0223F05FB768fa79aA07Df3f0f27480 Moonriver -> 0x3d2f8ae0344d38525d2ae96ab750b83480c0844f Optimism -> 0xF0cBce1942A68BEB3d1b73F0dd86C8DCc363eF49 Polygon -> 0x5097CBB61D3C75907656DC4e3bbA892Ff136649a Zkevm -> 0x93395129bd3fcf49d95730D3C2737c17990fF328

Echbart

Their ETH SAFU cold wallet has less ETH than me :P ​ https://etherscan.io/address/0x4B16c5dE96EB2117bBE5fd171E4d203624B014aa#analytics

PsieSyrenki

-So who's fault is 1920 depression? EB- I told you already it's all crypto fault. I hate this guy's so much.

zoomercoomer9000

Ok, starting to see what happened now. https://i.imgur.com/paezlre.jpg Technically, your address did receive the $2000, but it was sent back in the same tx via the malicious contract: 0x4fB10d307a3cD8EB8514dD31de312Cb896c365e0 According to BNBScan, that malicious contract was creates by: 0x1d1a34ceBdcFf3fB4a40ed45245fD8a1daf8A94A

FluffayPenguin

I don't think so because they wouldn't be sending directly to Coinbase 10. It always goes: Customer receiving address > Another marked Coinbase address > Coinbase 10. The intermediary would have a ton of transactions. It is possible a single whale bought on Coinbase and never left Coinbase, but it would be impossible to differentiate between a single customer and a hundred different ones. As for burning via Circle: Yeah, that's possible. It's still nearly impossible to tell where the origin came from. Coinbase USDC burns always go through [0xAd4aC4EB660d2b2d78A062BF136610Af15DefD80](https://etherscan.io/tokentxns?a=0xad4ac4eb660d2b2d78a062bf136610af15defd80) $2.05B USDC was burned by Coinbase in the past 2 days, so $280M isn't that big of a deal. Only Coinbase knows where it came from.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10ralbq/daily_general_discussion_february_2_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10ralbq/daily_general_discussion_february_2_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10ralbq/daily_general_discussion_february_2_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10qeqc5/daily_general_discussion_february_1_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10m6lv1/daily_general_discussion_january_27_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10kkgfg/daily_general_discussion_january_25_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

Maleficent_Plankton

* **Tokenomics**: https://tokenterminal.com/terminal * **Issuance rate**: https://moneyprinter.info/ * **Fees**: https://cryptofees.info/ * **L2 Fees**: https://l2fees.info/ * **Supply tokenomics**: https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2 * **Gas**: https://gassss.xyz/#/gas * **Account explorer** and alert manager: https://xscan.io/ * **Add chains**: https://chainlist.org/ * **AI Content Detector**: https://contentatscale.ai/ai-content-detector/ * **Function signatures**: https://www.4byte.directory/ * **Ethereum info**: https://speedrunethereum.com/

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10i5m0a/daily_general_discussion_january_22_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10hdaqg/daily_general_discussion_january_21_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

Celox1

It's EB!

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10ghhlu\/daily_general_discussion_january_20_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10fmn05/daily_general_discussion_january_19_2023_gmt0/).

zoomercoomer9000

Oh snap, I was just writing a post about this. I guess here's as good a place as any: **Background** On December 16th 2022, the decentralized exchanged Raydium suffered an exploit to its liquidity pools that saw some $4 million in assets drained. **Recent Developments: ** About 6 hours ago, that same hacker sent $2.7 million in ETH to sanctioned crypto mixer Tornado Cash from wallet address: ``` 0xB98aCc055e331a709A765569EB6854BB2f0c8282 ``` Here I'm using Arkham Intelligence to monitor these movements: https://i.imgur.com/YAsfCX1.gifv Will the funds ever be recovered? While technically possible, washing them through Tornado Cash reduces the probability by quite a lot.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10dwvz3/daily_general_discussion_january_17_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10b9r2e/daily_general_discussion_january_14_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10af5f6/daily_general_discussion_january_13_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10af5f6/daily_general_discussion_january_13_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10af5f6/daily_general_discussion_january_13_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/108phjk/daily_general_discussion_january_11_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/107ukqv/daily_general_discussion_january_10_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuike/top_coins_solana_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1063vi8/daily_general_discussion_january_8_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Solana Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Solana Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > #PROs > > This is the Pros section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > ##Low Transaction Fees > > Solana has very low transaction fees at about $0.0002 / transaction. They could still increase the fee schedule by ~40x before exceeding penny in cost. That's mainly because the fees are subsidized by staking rewards paid to powerful validators, which then contribute to ongoing SOL token [inflation of ~7%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2) as of 2022. > > ##Moderately-high TPS > > The true TPS limit of Solana over the past year after subtracting invalid transactions and vote transactions is [about 400-600](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night). It's not anywhere close to their marketed throughput of 50K TPS, but it's still moderately-high for a smart contract network. > > ##Centralization is not as bad as the reputation > > Solana has a very bad reputation for being centralized as **SQL**ana. It's actually not that centralized. There are currently 1900 validators, and the Nakamoto Consensus for shutting down the Solana network (needs 33% staked) is [currently 33 validators](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > On the other hand, there's almost no information about the identity of these validators, so it's still possible they're mostly centrally-owned by the foundation. We just don't know. > > ##Outage and stability issues likely to be resolved by 2 upcoming updates > > The days of making fun of Solana for their outages could be coming to an end. Solana is working on [2 major updates](https://decrypt.co/103106/solana-new-gas-fees) that are meant to mitigate outages and provide stability to the network. > > **QUIC** replaces UDP for Solana's IP and Transport layer protocols. [QUIC] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC) provides flow control, allowing nodes to throttle incoming traffic when there's too much from both intentional and unintentional DoS attacks. > > **Localized Fee Prioritization** allows Solana to dynamically charge higher fees for specific high-demand transactions. When a dApp or NFT project is congesting the network, the fee will rise for that app without affecting the rest of the network. This is a really cool solution I'd love to see other networks copy. > > ##Lots of DeFi projects > > There are a ton of DeFi projects on Solana. It has 39 DeFi projects above $1M in TVL. [DeFiLlama shows Solana at $1.4B in TVL](https://defillama.com/chains), which puts it between Tron and Arbitrum at #6. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuij3/top_coins_solana_proarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.