Lies, fraud & dangerous trade-offs: a famous investor Justin Bons heavily criticizes Solana

On October 1, Solana went down (for 6 hours). Again! It was the 8th time in the past year. So, basically, the “Ethereum killer” crashes almost every month.

Well, this time, founder & chief investment officer at Cyber Capital Justin Bons couldn’t hold back from such a thing. So he posted a list of downtime, disruptions, break-ins, and scandals related to Solana on his Twitter.

“For some investors such as myself, that history is reason enough to stay far away from SOL. Being more informed helps everyone make better decisions in this free market,” Bons admits.

Here are a few main points from his long criticizing thread:

• SOL has a centralized design. After the last crash, “a decision was made to restart the cluster.” In his words, the chain was reset centralized using checkpointing.
• SOL was caught lying about the circulating supply. Bons said that in early April 2020, the project team stated that the total SOL revolving supply was 8.2M. But in fact, it did not exceed 20M. He also referred to a third party who discovered an unlocked SOL wallet containing 13M tokens.
• SOL made false statements about TPS (transactions per second). The SOL team claimed the network was brought down by achieving over 400k TPS. But in experts` opinion, if transactions (TX) do not make it into the chain, you cannot claim that as the TPS limit because TXs in mempool (GS) do not count towards TPS. Also, by January 2021, it became known that SOL depends on consensus coordination messages as if they were TX. This led to a 100-fold increase in TPS. That is, most of the TPS is “bogus.”
• SOL is deceptively designed to inflate usage falsely.
• The SOL ecosystem was complicit in “faking” peak TVL numbers (Total Value Locked. Shows the amount of blocked or frozen funds on the smart contract of a project or a specific liquidity pool. In simple words: if you see an abbreviation of TVL, it means how much money is currently invested in that particular project or liquidity pool.). Two developers posed as 10+ developers and counted the same TVL repeatedly. This was 70% of the $10B TVL SOL at its peak.

Dozens of problems and as many complaints

Solana has experienced several network outages. For example, on June 1, a transaction error brought the entire chain to a standstill and led to four hours of network downtime. Then in January 2022, there was a network failure due to an arbitrage bot spamming. Solana also experienced several outages last year. The constant crashes are one of the fattest drawbacks of the yet-to-be-finished “Ethereum killer.”

Earlier, an anonymous software developer spoke unflatteringly about Solana. He claimed that the project was not decentralized and could easily be replaced by a SQL database.

Also, in July, estate plaintiff Mark Young filed a suit against Solana Labs, Solana Foundation, Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, crypto investment company Multicoin Capital and its co-founder Kyle Samani, and trading platform FalconX. He accused them of profiting by selling SOL to retail investors in the United States in violation of federal and state securities law registration provisions, resulting in huge losses for investors.

Why Solana is the so-called “Ethereum killer”?

Solana is a Tier 1 blockchain network with smart contracts, founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko, a senior engineer manager at Qualcomm.

Solana compares favorably to Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of better scalability and throughput (the number of transactions completed per second). For example, this network can process transactions as they come in rather than waiting for a block to be filled, which can be a long process.

In the Ethereum blockchain, users sometimes face high gas fees due to the lack of scalability (unlike its “killer”). However, the recent transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) has benefited this network. In addition, Solana already had a PoS structure as a consensus mechanism.

Using PoS, the Solana network consumed less electricity and therefore had less impact on the environment (but now Ethereum has pulled ahead in this regard).

Solana uses the more common programming languages: C, C++, and Rust. Ethereum, on the other hand, uses Solidity, Viper, Yul/Yul+, and Fe.

Solana’s architecture is more sophisticated and supports multithreading. Gulf Stream transaction forwarding mechanism runs programs instead of meme pools.

The sevenfold drop

Solana tokens (SOL) were launched in April 2019 and traded for less than $1 per coin at the time. The price rose above $250 at its peak in November 2021 and then dropped along with other cryptocurrencies during the crypto winter that began in May 2022. As of September 2022, Solana was trading at around $35. October 4th, the value was around $33.55