There's a lot to like about Solana, but one thing to dislike is the ongoing claim by the Solana community that Solana is actually fairly decentralized.
In reality, Solana is a highly centralized blockchain. Solana has zero protocol specs (the code is the spec), one production client, one main development organization (Solana Labs), limited exposure to the academic research community, and the entire network only runs in data centers due to extreme hardware & bandwidth requirements.
If we wanted to boil down decentralization into a narrow metric (we shouldn't want this, but if we did), that metric might be "how many guns to how many heads to force an invalid state transition?" And Solana scores very poorly on this metric.
These are good things to be concerned about. There's a second client and a second validator in the works, there's some stats on datacenter decentralisation in the youtube link above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NDs3Il2J3Q&t=303s - 230 datacenters, 9% in a single data center. But yes lots of work to be done - I don't want to pretend there isn't - but also don't want to pretend that a network with far less activity has has already done it.
I may be wrong today, but I took a peek awhile back and Solana's top N validators -- enough to exert outright control over the network -- were operated by companies from within the same 2-3 VC portfolios, which struck me as a shockingly poor standard of "decentralization" for a network which apparently prides itself on that metric.
From a certain angle, it could almost look as if said VCs were trying to add legitimacy to their portfolio investments by colluding to make Solana seem busier and safer than it really is...
In reality, Solana is a highly centralized blockchain. Solana has zero protocol specs (the code is the spec), one production client, one main development organization (Solana Labs), limited exposure to the academic research community, and the entire network only runs in data centers due to extreme hardware & bandwidth requirements.
If we wanted to boil down decentralization into a narrow metric (we shouldn't want this, but if we did), that metric might be "how many guns to how many heads to force an invalid state transition?" And Solana scores very poorly on this metric.