Written by: Lostin, Helius Compiled by: Yangz, Techub News

Abstract

As of Epoch 685, Solana has 4514 nodes, including 1414 validators and 3100 RPCs. No validator controls more than 3.2% of the stake.

The Nakamoto Coefficient (NC) represents the minimum number of independent entities that can maliciously collude to invalidate the validity and refuse to reach the consensus required for the production of new blocks. Solana’s Satoshi coefficient is currently 19, but the actual number is likely lower because a single entity can operate multiple validators anonymously.

Solana has validators in 37 countries and regions. The largest concentration of validators is in the United States, with 508. Additionally, four jurisdictions each accounted for more than 10% share, with the United States at 18.3%, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom both at 13.7%, and Germany at 13.2%.

68% of the pledges are delegated to European validators, of which 50.5% are delegated to validators within the EU (excluding Norway, Ukraine and the UK). Additionally, 20% is entrusted to North America.

Validators are distributed across 135 different hosting providers. Among them, Teraswitch and Latitude.sh (formerly Maxihost) are the two leading providers. The former is an American private company that provides hosting services for validators, accounting for a combined 24% share; the latter is a Brazilian company that provides verification services for validators. Provide low-cost bare metal servers, accounting for a combined 19% share.

The Agave client code base has 357 individual contributors. The Firedancer client is developed by a small team led by Chief Scientific Officer Kevin Bowers and currently has 57 contributors.

The Jito client is a fork of Agave’s original codebase that incorporates an auction for off-protocol block space and currently holds a dominant 88% share of the network. However, this is expected to change significantly over the next 12 months as new Firedancer clients are gradually introduced and integrated into the ecosystem. Solana and Ethereum are currently the only L1s that offer multiple client implementations.

Significant changes to Solana's core components are subject to a formal, public Solana Improvement and Development (SIMD) proposal process. The most significant protocol changes, especially those that affect economic parameters, are subject to a governance vote. So far, three such votes have been taken.

The Solana Foundation was established in June 2019. It is a non-profit organization registered in Switzerland and is committed to developing and supporting the Solana ecosystem. The foundation team is relativelyThe streamlined, staffed team of 60-65 full-time employees oversees funding sources for grants, commissioning programs, and developer tools.

Additionally, the geographic diversity of Solana’s developer community has been demonstrated. The latest hackathon event "Radar" attracted 13,672 participants from 156 countries, with high participation from India, Nigeria, the United States and Vietnam. The SuperTeam, a network connecting Solana creatives, developers, and operations staff, has grown to 1,300 members in 16 countries.

What is decentralization

Decentralization can be summarized as having no single point of failure within the system. This multifaceted concept touches on many aspects, including token distribution, influence of key individuals, participation in permissionless networks, development control, and software/hardware diversity. Aside from Balaji’s Satoshi coefficient, there are few accepted standards for quantifying the degree of blockchain decentralization. Many measures are imperfect. Furthermore, discussions around blockchain decentralization are often rooted in philosophy, sparking deep ideological debates that sometimes border on contention. Solana's degree of decentralization has been criticized by some in the blockchain community, who believe that Solana lacks the ability to be decentralized and resist censorship. A recent example is former US Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, who expressed his concerns during the keynote speech at the Token2049 conference. However, like many of Solana's critics, Snowden did not provide any data to substantiate his claims, despite being publicly invited to do so. In the following sections of this article, we will analyze Solana’s decentralization through data, highlighting where the network exhibits relatively strong decentralization while pointing out areas where further progress is needed.

Dimensions of Decentralization

Through this report, we will take a quantitative and multifaceted approach to analyze Solana’s decentralization situation, based on facts and publicly verifiable information. We will evaluate the following:

Staking distribution

Geographical distribution of nodes

Diversity of hosting providers

Customers Diversity of end software

Diversity of developers

Governance processes and entities

In due course, we will integrate Solana’s metrics with other PoS L1 Make a comparison. To be clear, the peer network serves only as a baseline to provide broader context for Solana’s decentralization journey and to highlight areas where it may be lagging behind or exceeding expectations. These comparisons should not be misinterpreted as attempts to claim that one network is superior to another. In many cases, Ethereum provides the most useful benchmark as it is widely considered the most decentralized PoS L1. It is worth noting that the founding block of Ethereum was in 2015was produced in July 2020, while Solana’s founding block was produced in March 2020. Decentralization is dynamic, and blockchains typically become more decentralized over time. Given similar conditions, it is reasonable to expect that the old chain will be more decentralized.

Distribution of pledges

The pledge distribution of a blockchain network refers to how the native tokens of the network are distributed among validators. In a well-distributed system, no one validator or small group will hold an excessive share of pledges, so the risk of any one entity gaining undue influence or control over the network consensus is also reduced. A balanced stake distribution ensures validator diversity, thereby promoting decentralization and making it difficult for any malicious actor to compromise the integrity of the network. It also helps improve fault tolerance as the network becomes more resilient to individual validator failures. “You need a very large validator set. On an intuitive level, the larger the validator set, the more secure the network, and on an academic level, the larger the node set, the easier it is to ensure that you are an honest minority in the set. Nodes always have a minimum spanning tree that can reach each other. This doesn't even refer to the protocol layer, but the fact that people can go into Discord or talk on the phone. IRC, or talking to each other on cell phones. And that's the key to us solving the problem of fragmentation and finding out what the problem is, the easier it is to ensure that fragmentation is impossible." ——Anatoly Yakovenko, Breakpoint 2024 Running a node on Solana is fully permissionless, requiring only an extremely low mandatory minimum stake (1 SOL) to run as a validator. The network natively supports Delegated Proof of Stake (dPoS) and consists of 4514 nodes, including 1414 validators and 3100 RPC nodes. The two largest validators by pledge volume are operated by Helius and Galaxy, each holding approximately 3.2% of the pledge share. The minimum commissioned pledge amounts required to enter the top one-third and top two-thirds are 4.4 million SOL and 1.23 million SOL respectively.

For greater clarity, the following figure groups validators by delegated pledge. Among them, 82 validators (accounting for 5.87% of the total) hold more than 1 million delegated SOL; 825 validators (accounting for 59.1% of the total) hold less than 50,000 delegated SOL, and most of them have participated in Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP), a program designed to help smaller validators quickly achieve sustainable development. Approximately 72% of Solana validators benefit from SFDP support, and these validators collectively account for 19% of total staking. For an in-depth look at SFDP, see our earlierPublished Helius Report: "SFDP and the Challenges Facing Long-Tail Validators".

Just as blockchain addresses do not equate to users, the number of validators does not reflect the true number of different entities operating validators. The true number will be lower as large entities may choose to distribute their stakes among multiple validators. For example, Jito (1,2), Coinbase (1,2), and Mrgn (1,2) operate multiple validators. There is no inherent problem with a single entity operating multiple validators; in fact, as long as validators are distributed rather than centralized, the network can be strengthened by increasing the diversity of geographies and hosting providers. However, risks can arise if these validators are identically configured with non-standard settings or firewall rules. In addition, having one entity manage many validators on behalf of a large company or project as part of the "validator as a service" model may lead to further decentralization issues.

Nakamoto Coefficient

In a proof-of-stake network, the Nakamoto Coefficient represents the minimum number of nodes required to control at least one-third of the total pledges. The higher the coefficient, the wider the distribution of pledges and the higher the degree of decentralization. Furthermore, it can also be thought of as the minimum number of independent entities that can maliciously collude to cause a validity failure, thereby denying the consensus required for the production of new blocks. Blockchains based on PoS and Byzantine Fault Tolerance require more than two-thirds of the staking nodes to reach consensus on the network state before transaction processing can continue. To determine Solana’s Satoshi Coefficient, we ranked validators from highest to lowest stake share and calculated the number of validators required to control one-third of total stake. The result is that Solana’s Satoshi coefficient reached its highest value of 34 on August 13, 2023, and is currently 19. The coefficient has been relatively stable over the past year.

Compared with similar networks in the industry, Solana’s Satoshi coefficient ranks in the middle. However, the above data does not take into account the situation where a single entity can operate multiple validators anonymously, so the true Satoshi coefficient may be lower.

Geographic distribution of validators and staking nodes

Geographical diversity of network nodes is critical to reducing risk and promoting the antifragility of the network. If too many validators are concentrated in one region, the network's resilience becomes dependent on the regulatory framework of those specific jurisdictions. Natural disasters, including earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and tsunamis, pose another risk. Such events can stress the power grid, severely disrupt data center operations, and cause sudden outages. Man-made threats, such as war, cyberattacks and disruptions to critical Internet infrastructure, including undersea cables, also pose risks that compromise network stability. The Solana data used for the analysis in this section comes from validators685 epochs of .app. A spreadsheet format of the original data set can be found here. These data only reflect staked validator nodes and do not include unstaking RPC nodes.

Solana validators and staking nodes by continent

When broken down by continent, the data shows that 632 Solana validators (46%) are located in Europe and 550 (40%) are located in North America. In terms of stake distribution, 68% of stakes are delegated to validators in Europe and 20% to validators in North America. Of this, 50.5% of staking is delegated to validators operating within the EU (excluding Norway, Ukraine and the UK).

In comparison, Ethereum’s staking distribution is similar, but North America is weighted higher at 34.4%.

Solana validators by region and regions

Solana’s validators are distributed in 37 different regions and regions. The largest concentration is in the United States, with 508 validators (37%) running in US data centers, followed by 112 validators in the Netherlands (8%) and 111 validators in Russia (8%).

Geographical distribution of Solana validators by stake share

The distribution is more even when validators are measured by stake share. Four major jurisdictions each accounted for more than 10% share, with the United States at 18.3%, followed by the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, both at 13.7%, and Germany at 13.2%.

In contrast, Ethereum nodes are distributed in 83 different countries and regions, nearly half of which are located in the United States and Germany.

Top 10 cities ranked by number of Solana nodes and stake share

A more granular analysis of validator and delegated stake distribution by city shows that Solana validators are distributed in 121 locations around the world cities. Specifically, in the United States, validators are spread across all major regions, including a total of 35 cities. The most popular cities are Chicago (124 validators, 2.3% stake share), Los Angeles (57 validators, 2.3% stake share), and New York (32 validators, 3.5% stake share).

Earlier this year, Anza employee Rex St. John proposed improvements to Solana strategy for validator geographic diversity (especially by expanding support for Global South operators) and identified several key challenges:

Higher latency: Nodes in remote areas struggle to keep up with the network

Bandwidth costs: Bandwidth costs are very high in some regions

Regulatory restrictions: Laws implemented in different jurisdictions limit the feasibility of operating blockchain infrastructure

< p>Underdeveloped infrastructure: network and data center basicsInsufficient facilities

Unfavorable taxes and duties: High cost of hardware equipment

Talent shortage: Lack of local professional Solana talent, limited access to capital required for staking

Host delivery Providers

Ideally, the validator set should be hosted by multiple independent providers, rather than relying heavily on a few centralized providers. This diversification is critical to reducing the risk of network disruption or censorship from any single provider. One notable incident in 2022 involved German hosting provider Hetzner, which accidentally removed Solana validators from its service, causing more than 20% of active staking nodes (~1000 validators) to lose power for several hours. offline within. Despite this, Solana remains fully operational without any failure issues. Most affected validators were successfully migrated to new data centers within days, and nearly all staking nodes were back online within weeks.

Solana validator hosts by stake share

Solana validators are scattered among 135 different hosts, led by Teraswitch and Latitude.sh (formerly Maxihost). The former is a US private company that hosts 24% of validators, and the latter is a Brazilian low-cost bare metal server provider that hosts 19% of validators. The two suppliers together accounted for 43.4%. Other popular hosts include French cloud computing company OVHcloud (8.65% share) and Lithuania’s Cherry Servers (8.45% share).

Solana validator hardware requirements

As a high-performance, high-throughput blockchain, Solana has higher node requirements than most industry peers. Hardware recommendations for Solana validators include the following key components:

CPU: 24 cores/48 threads or above, 4.2GHz base clock speed or faster

Memory: 512 GB

Disk: PCIe Gen3 x4 NVME SSD or higher, 2TB combo or higher. High TBW

No GPU requirements

In practice, Solana's bandwidth requirements make home operation impractical, so validators are primarily run by bare metal servers in dedicated data centers.

Diversity of Solana Clients

Solana launched with a single validator client developed by Solana Labs and written in Rust. While the Solana Labs client is no longer actively updated, a fork called Agave is still in use. Completely dependent on a single client implementationThis is an important manifestation of centralization because it brings the risk of critical software errors, thereby invalidating the effectiveness of the entire network. Increasing client diversity has always been a priority for the Solana community, and with the launch of Firedancer, this goal is finally achieved.

Solana Client

Currently, multiple Solana client solutions are running or under development:

Agave: a fork of the Solana Labs original client, written in the Rust language and developed by Solana Software Company Anza maintains.

Firedancer: Maintained by Jump Crypto, it is a complete rewrite of the original client in C language.

Frankendancer: A hybrid validator that combines the network stack and block production components of Firedancer with the execution and consensus of Agave.

Jito: A fork of the Agave client built by Jito Labs that introduces an off-protocol block space auction to provide more economic incentives for validators through tips.

Sig: Syndica's read-optimized Solana validator client written in Zig.

In addition, Mithril is a client written in Golang and developed by Overclock that can be used as a verification full node with low hardware requirements. Having multiple full-time core engineering teams review each other's code base greatly increases the likelihood of finding bugs while promoting knowledge sharing and collaboration. "We've learned a lot from the Firedancer account team; they've come up with a lot of really clever solutions," Anza engineer Joe Caulfield noted in a recent interview. In addition, both Agave and Firedancer have launched bug bounty programs.

Solana client diversity vs. Ethereum

Solana and Ethereum are the only L1s that offer multiple client implementations. There are at least five major software clients for Ethereum. The most widely adopted are Nethermind, written in C, with 45% usage, and Geth, written in Go, with 39% usage. On Solana, the Jito client currently accounts for 88% of staking nodes. However, this landscape is expected to change significantly over the next 12 months with the gradual introduction and integration of new clients (Frankendancer and Firedancer).

Developer Decentralization

In the book "Quantitative Decentralization", Balaji believes that developer decentralization is a key factor in the blockchain ecosystem, emphasizing the maximum Reduce reliance on individual contributors and reduce “key people”the importance of risk. All core client software on Solana is publicly hosted on GitHub under an open source license, allowing open access and community contributions. Agave validators, maintained by Anza, a software development company founded in early 2024, play an important role in this area. Anza was founded with about 45 employees, about half of Solana Labs' previous workforce. In addition to managing Agave, the Anza team contributes to the broader Solana ecosystem by developing projects such as token scaling, cross-border payment infrastructure, and the Solana licensing environment.

Number of contributors to the Agave client code base

The Agave client code base has 357 contributors and 26,408 commits. However, only in terms of the number of original commits, the data is not perfect and cannot fully reflect individual contributions. depth. It's worth noting that most commits are written primarily by a small group of developers, primarily senior engineers and co-founders of Solana, in addition to a long list of smaller contributors.

In contrast, the popular Geth and Nethermind clients on Ethereum also show a similar "centralization" model of contributors within the larger community. Geth has 1098 contributors, while Nethermind has 142. Among them, more than half of Geth's Commits are attributed to three core contributors. Of all Nethermind’s commits, two developers contributed more than 50%.

Number of contributors to the Firedancer client code base

Firedancer client was developed by a small team led by Kevin Bowers of the famous American high-frequency trading company Jump, and currently has 57 contributors and 3722 commits. Given that Firedancer is a relatively new project (the first Commit dates back to August 2022) and only recently launched on mainnet, the diversity of contributors is still limited.

Solana Ecosystem Developers

The geographical diversity of the developer community within the broader Solana ecosystem is unquestionable. Solana’s biannual online hackathons are among the most attended events in the world and have been instrumental in developing today’s most successful Solana protocol and application teams, including Tensor, Drift, Jito, and Kamino. The latest “Radar” attracted 13,672 participants from 156 countries/regions, with particularly prominent representatives from India, Nigeria, the United States, and Vietnam.

In addition, Superteam, the network that connects Solana creatives, developers and operations staff, has now expanded to 1,300 members across 16 regions. Its local chapters foster collaboration by hosting events and sharing workspaces. In addition, the Solana Allstars ambassador program launched by Step Finance has achieved great success in Nigeria, with more than 120 gatherings held in many regions and a steady stream of participants.

Governance

Governance is an important carrier of decentralization because it determines how decisions are made within the network. This affects everything from protocol upgrades to economic and community rules. Decentralized governance enhances transparency, fairness, and trust in the network.

Governance Voting and SIMD

A Solana Improvement and Development (SIMD) proposal is the formal document required to make any substantive changes to Solana's core components. “Substantial” changes are defined here as those that typically change network protocols, transaction validity, or interoperability. Non-substantive changes, such as minor code refactoring or objective performance improvements, do not require proposals. While submitting a SIMD does not require any permission and can be submitted by any developer or researcher, most SIMDs are submitted by client team developers who work full-time on improvements to the core protocol. SIMD has two types of proposals:

Standard proposals: affecting core Solana functionality (such as consensus, networking, and API interfaces)

Meta proposals: involving processes or guidelines outside the code base

SIMD Process

SIMD typically goes through the stages of idea review, drafting, review and acceptance. Formal review is conducted publicly on GitHub, and proposal authors are responsible for gathering feedback from relevant core contributors who decide whether to accept, modify, or withdraw the proposal. Authors are under no obligation to implement their proposals, but they are generally advised to do so as this is the best way to ensure successful completion of the proposal. If a proposal is accepted, it will usually contain an associated feature implementation tracking issue and may need to be activated through Solana's feature-gate mechanism. Feature gate will be activated first on Testnet, then on Devnet, and finally on Mainnet according to time boundaries. Discussions about improvements occurred in the following areas:

SIMD (Solana Improvement Documents) Github repository

Solana official forum sRFC (Solana Request for Comments) section

Solana Technical Discussion Forum

Social channels, includingSIMD economic parameters must go through governance voting. The Solana governance voting process is a relatively new initiative, spearheaded by long-time members of the validator community, focusing only on key issues to maintain engagement and avoid governance fatigue. To date, three such votes have been held, including:

First advisory vote in October 2023 (14.3% of staking nodes participated)

On timely voting in April 2024 SIMD33 of points (53% of staking nodes participating)

SIMD96 of May 2024 on paying full priority fees to validators (51% staking nodes participate)

Voting is conducted through tokens deposited into each validator identity account, with each account receiving tokens proportional to its share of active staking in lamport. To vote, validators need to transfer tokens to one of several designated public keys corresponding to the voting option (including the abstention option). Once voted, it cannot be changed. In this structure, SOL token holders participate only indirectly, delegating their SOL holdings to validators whose votes align with their values ​​or preferences.

Governance Benchmark

According to a benchmark report released by CCData earlier this year, among the top 40 digital assets evaluated by environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards, Solana is one of only four to be rated AA one of the assets. Solana ranked fourth among L1 in the report's governance ratings, which evaluated factors including stakeholder engagement, transparency and decentralization.

Solana Foundation

The Solana Foundation (SF) was established in June 2019. It is a non-profit organization registered in Switzerland and is committed to the decentralization and adoption of the Solana ecosystem. and safety. With an initial capital of 167 million SOL tokens, SF oversees funding for grants, delegation programs, and developer tools. It controls official brand assets, social media accounts, websites and trademarks. Currently, SF is led by Executive Director Daniel Albert and President Lily Liu and operates with a relatively lean team of 60-65 full-time employees under the oversight of the Foundation’s Board of Directors. The foundation's mission is to build a scalable, self-sustaining Solana ecosystem, with a focus on education, research, and ecological development initiatives. SF organizes large-scale Solana events, including Hacker Houses and the annual Breakpoint conference, to promote developer engagement and community building. The SF Developer Relations team maintains official documentation, social channels, and developer education. In January 2024, SF handed over management of the flagship hackathon to Colosseum, a new independentAccelerator, co-founded by former SF growth director Matty Taylor. Dan Albert pointed out in a recent debate that “our job is to free ourselves from work, find scalable ways to support networks and ecosystems, and then let it go.” This suggests that SF’s long-term goal is to build a system that can self-operate without oversight. maintained network.

Summary

As stated in this article, Solana’s decentralization is measured on a number of key metrics, including the Satoshi coefficient, geographic distribution of validators and staking nodes, developer decentralization, and governance benchmarks. All are on par or better than their industry counterparts, while client diversity is still a glaring issue that the new Firedancer client aims to solve. To strengthen Solana's decentralization, consider the following areas:

Explore options for distributing SF responsibilities to multiple organizations

Increase foundation spending and grants Transparency of allocation

Formulate as "Solana Nations" to increase geographic diversity

Reduce the largest expense for validator operators, namely voting costs

Explore strategies to reduce the need for validators to export data; EU and Data export costs are significantly higher for validator operators outside the United States

Encourage more active participation in governance voting

Expand Solana's core contributor and research community to strengthen the network's development

Currently, Solana The validator set remains somewhat concentrated in the US and EU and relies on a limited number of hosting providers. While this challenge is not unique to Solana, it highlights Solana’s potential for improvements in reducing centralization at this level. Finally, thanks to Overclock, Amira Valliani, Matt Sorg, Yelena Cavanaugh, Dan Albert, Tim Garcia, 0xIchigo, Anatoly Yakovenko, and Brady Werkheiser for reviewing earlier versions of this article.