Dogecoin Founder Slams Solana As ‘Centralized Database’

Billy Markus, one of the inventors of Dogecoin is known on Twitter for not making light of things. In one of his latest tweets, the software developer attacked the Solana (SOL) blockchain as a decentralized project without utility.

The Dogecoin creator known on Twitter as Shibetoshi Nakamoto first wrote that he considers blockchains, which cannot scale and suffer from high transaction fees, useless. At first, Markus did not name any names, but only wrote in a general statement:

Real talk, high gas fees / high transaction fees in popular cryptos essentially make them broken garbage scale the tech or it’s ngmi [not gonna make it].

Users in the community responded with various replies to the Dogecoin founder’s claim. One user shared a meme of NANO, a cryptocurrency from 2017’s bull run that was massively hyped for its high scalability but never caught on due to a lack of use cases.

However, Markus dismissed NANO as not a valid answer, saying it was only about popular blockchains. He wrote: “I said popular crypto (jkjk but it was too easy).”

i said popular crypto

(jkjk but it was too easy)

— Shibetoshi Nakamoto (@BillyM2k) May 3, 2023

Another user countered the Dogecoin inventor that Bitcoin’s block space size of 1 MB and block time of 10 minutes is a feature, not a bug. In the long run, this will benefit Bitcoin, and turn BTC into a reserve asset.

Regarding layer-2s (L2s) and L3s becoming “normal” everyday uses of cryptocurrencies, the user agreed with Markus. The latter replied, “I guess if it’s not meant to scale then sure.”

Is Solana Centralized?

When someone in the comment thread remarked that “Solana fixes this,” by which he meant the gas fees and the limited speed, Markus slammed the blockchain as a “centralized database.” He wrote:

Solana is basically a centralized database though, it doesn’t really solve anything.

To recall, the Solana blockchain has gone offline several times in recent years. The Solana Foundation had to reboot the ledger each time. But what is really true about the claim from the Dogecoin founder that Solana is useless and centralized?

In terms of transaction fees and processing speed, the SOL blockchain is known to be one of the best and most popular blockchains. As Nansen reported just today, Solana ranks second among blockchains with the most active addresses. Therefore, the claim that Solana is useless doesn’t really seem to be true.

Which chains had the most on-chain active addresses in April & how did they compare to March?

BNB Chain: 10.9M (-11%)
Solana: 5.1M (-12%)
Ethereum: 4.9M (-7.9%)
Polygon: 4.2M (+6%)
Arbitrum: 2.4M (+7.8%)

And what were these addresses doing?

Let’s take a look on-chain… pic.twitter.com/mjrBPgbmif

— Nansen 🧭 (@nansen_ai) May 3, 2023

However, the centralization question has been a point of criticism against Solana for quite some time. As Ryan Berckmans recently explained, Solana is much closer to Amazon Web Services (AWS) than to Ethereum and is much more centralized.

It’s not because of validators or stake statistics. It’s because Solana’s change management is “very centralized”. There are no specifications, no research community and no customer diversity, as Berckmans argues. According to the Web3 investor, Solana “evolves much like enterprise software” that is “primarily managed and executed by a single entity (Solana Labs).”

On the decentralization spectrum from eg. AWS to Ethereum, Solana is actually much closer to AWS than it is to Ethereum and significantly more centralized than many understand or represent. Not because of validator or stake stats. It’s because Solana’s change management is very…

— Ryan Berckmans ryanb.eth🦇🔊 (@ryanberckmans) May 1, 2023

At press time, the SOL price stood at $21.48. Given the current market situation, SOL is still holding strong and trying to defend a multi-month ascending trend line (black). However, a daily close above $22 is crucial today.

Featured image from Tech Times, chart from TradingView.com