1/25) Solana has far too many red flags Blockchains should never have downtime Yet SOL has gone down at least 7 times since I first spoke out! A consequence of their own design decisions There are many examples of lies, fraud & bad design Exposing a pattern of bad behavior:
2/25) Starting with blatant fraud at the birth of this project: In early April 2020 the SOL team stated that the total circulating supply was 8.2M When in reality the total circulating supply was above 20M! As questions & critiques started to pile up over the following weeks,
3/25) The official moderators kept insisting that there was no extra circulating supply as people grew more suspicious Especially as SOL failed to update their Binance & Coinmarketcap info By the end of the month a 3rd party found a unlocked Solana wallet containing 13M tokens!
4/25) Once the Solana team was fully exposed they released a medium article admitting to the fraud, Explaining that these 13M tokens where loaned to a “marketmaker” While promising to get these coins back & burn them within 30 days On numerous occasions in the following weeks,
5/25) The Solana team guaranteed that they would not release any new coins into the market without announcing it beforehand Repeatedly making this promise! On may 23rd the Solana team announced that they were only able to retrieve 3.3M coins out of the 11.3M they had loaned out
6/25) So instead they released 8M new SOL tokens into circulation in order meet their commitment to burn without any announcement beforehand! The total circulating supply was now 16M, double the supply promised in April! After this they just moved on,
7/25) Not even publishing this release on any of their own official announcement channels This can all be verified! From Telegram to subtly reading between the lines of their own Medium article releases Links to all primary sources can be found here:
web.archive.org/web/2020070105…
8/25) Now we will cover more of the lies: On the 15th of Sep 2021 the SOL network was brought down by a very high TX count @Solana claimed the network was brought down by doing 400k TPS This was a objectively false claim designed to make SOL look better then it really is!
9/25) If TXs do not make it into the blockchain, you cannot claim that as the TPS limit TXs in mempool (Gulf Stream) do not count towards TPS! TPS is a measure of network capacity, BTC can even handle higher loads on its mempool! Evidence was & still is all onchain:
10/25) The reality is that SOL is not innovative at all! It is just the first major blockchain to be so reckless in their fundamental design While pretending as if that is innovative! Most VC's just do not understand the engineering trade offs & the inherent risks involved
11/25) Specifically Proof of History & Turbine: A consequence of PoH is deterministic block creation Before SOL almost all blockchains used non-deterministic block creation As it adds to security & censorship resistance as you cannot predict who will create the next block
12/25) Instead in SOL it is possible to predict & therefore attack the next block producers inline For instance attacking the next 100 validators inline instead of attacking the entire network This attack also works regardless of scale, thereby severely reducing SOL security!
13/25) SOL security is not just reduced against DDoS attacks since this attack can be combined with a 51% attack As an attacker would not need 51% stake to carry out a 51% attack Due to PoH an attacker could DDoS next stake holders inline & thereby gain control over the network
14/25) Combining Turbine with PoH leads to even more dire consequences: Turbine divides the transaction memory pool into small groupings of validators This means that with PoH you can censor transactions by just attacking the specific validators in that grouping next inline!
15/25) The Sol team has consistently displayed a pattern of bad behavior Prioritizing attracting ignorant investors over good blockchain design SOL is likely purposefully tricking non-technical investors with technobabble A perfect example of this is how consensus TX's work:
16/25) In SOL several consensus mechanisms are counted as transactions, which validators have to carry out Which means validators also have to pay the TX fee for these mechanisms, unlike most other chains This results in validation being far more expensive then it needs to be!
17/25) Unnecessarily centralizing the network! Estimates are upwards of 6M USD in order to run a validator profitably! The strange thing about this specific design choice is that there is no trade off! Unlike PoH & Turbine which does trade decentralization for scalability
18/25) Counting consensus mechanisms as TX's gives no objective advantages! All that I can think off is that it does make SOL appear as if it has a higher TPS than it really has If that is why this design choice was made, that would be extremely deceptive & crooked behavior
19/25) As it stands now: I cannot find a good reason why you would design a blockchain in that way! Leading me to believe that this is a case of the SOL team consciously; Prioritizing attracting ignorant investors over good blockchain design Deception through obfuscation
20/25) Now Solana is launching a phone instead of focusing on their broken blockchain This is not something that cryptocurrency needs or wants All modern phones already contain Secure Elements! (HW) It is more likely that this is another way for the SOL team to pivot & cash in
21/25) It is shocking how many professional investors have fallen for these tricks The VC support SOL gained says a lot about the maturity of the ecosystem There is still a severe lack of understanding of blockchain fundamentals As I would not touch SOL with a ten foot pole!
22/25) Consistently displaying a pattern of bad behavior SOL was caught lying about the initial circulating supply SOL made false statements around TPS SOL design just leans into scalability in the context of the blockchain trilemma While pretending as if that is innovative!
23/25) Earnest attempts at scaling through sharding, sidechains & state channels preserve decentralization Just throwing hardware at the problem is not innovative at all! This is how SOL rose to prominence Even going so far as to double down on very bad security assumptions:
24/25) I have been evaluating cryptocurrencies for more than 8 years We have to be forgiving of flaws but as investors also be critical Therefore; join the debate, critics & supporters are both welcome! Almost every chain has a potential redemption arc
25/25) I would praise SOL if it pivoted & fixed these flaws The problem is that it would require changing the very attributes that where sold as "features" to investors Human nature tends to double down on such mistakes Especially considering the money involved in such a ruse
