A popular Reddit post highlighting 10 negative points on Solana recently hit the front page of r/CryptoCurrency & liked on Twitter. This was posted by a Cardano maxi, Dave, and pushed up by holders of digital assets competing with SOL. Here is a long format response of each point to better help you understand the claims, and highlight the nuanced nature of truth. Enjoy!
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1 Bots constantly extract and front-run users that have slippage.
2 Transactions fail if you don’t have enough slippage, and users still have to pay for the failures.
3 The blockchain has at least 12 major outages so far.
4 Companies that run RPC endpoints can front-run you.
5 Solana has been officially in beta 4.5 years so far.
6 To become a validator you need to be extremely wealthy.
7 Their TPS is marketed wrong, it’s not 3000 TPS, they include voting and failed transactions in this marketing to fool you, it’s actually about ~250 TPS.
8 Solana circulating supply increased by 59.09 million over the last year which means they printed $8.5 billion.
9 Recently there was a vote passed for validators (the rich) to get 100% of high priority transactions.
10 $7.5 billion SOL, is continued to be sold-off by FTX, a major unlock occurs in March 2025, and continued unlocks every month up till 2028.
A breakdown and comparison to Cardano/Ethereum:
- This issue occurs on every chain unless it’s centralized like Ethereum’s Base/Arbitrum or Cardano’s proposed L2 solutions, where a sequencer or off-chain solutions can instead capture your fees and pay out less rewards to stakers. This is a pro/con provided by centralized L2s. It’s nothing to boast about. MEV extraction occurs on any decentralized setup.
- If a swap doesn’t meet user demands, it should fail, and you should still pay for the transaction since the network processed it. The network did exactly as instructed by the user. You pay for compute even if the outcome of your desired action on some on-chain application was not fulfilled. You also include these transactions in TPS metrics. This works the same way on Ethereum.
- Although Solana has experienced major outages, it’s always improving and will benefit from a multi-client setup, similar to Ethereum, which is more established. Firedancer is coming. More clients means more stability. I’m actually a bit surprised we haven’t gone down with meme mania, and now ore mining. Progress is obviously being made. Also, centralized L2s go down all the time. This is how you would need to scale Cardano/Ethereum.
- Any information obtained by an RPC node on any network can be used against you, so always choose trusted RPCs. This applies to Ethereum too. Cardano mitigates some of this in their model, but they end up running into their own set of issues when users need to depend on off chain solutions because of concurrency problems. Fact is, if people are trading there will always be order to the trades and there will always be a way to re-order for some value extraction. It happens from defi to tradfi. Cardano has not completely solved this, but their model does have pro/cons. The largest cons being speed, finality, and their defi ecosystem leaning on more centralizated solutions.
- Labeling something as “beta” seems fine and is weird to point out? Maybe Cardano should use the label too when explaining why no one uses it.
- Becoming an Ethereum validator also requires substantial wealth, whereas Solana/Cardano allow delegation, letting users vote for validators and capture network rewards/transaction fees. This is a better approach. Ethereum lacks this option, and trusting LSTs for staking is recognized as problematic in Ethereum. Solana lets users choose, with their money, who runs the network. They then are rewarded for that vote. Solana’s setup isn’t much different then Cardano here, but better than Ethereum. Yes, Solana validators cost more to spin up, but are also rewarded for higher performance. One method Solana is leveraging to stay ahead of demand. Demand being an issue that Cardano doesn’t face, and Ethereum has outsourced to centralized L2s.
- TPS (transactions per second) metrics are nuanced and tracked by third party block explorers, which include vote and non-vote transactions. This makes sense for Solana’s consensus model. Solana is currently pushing over 800 TPS in non-vote transactions as I wrote this and is scaling to potentially reach 50k-200k with updates like Firedancer. It likely already does around 2k-3k non-vote real world TPS peak from what we see, but this doesn’t account for the fact that Solana can do more swaps with the same compute as Cardano/Ethereum as it was coded to be more efficient with popular types of transactions. There is a lot to understand here. Simple fact is Solana continues to scale their base layer to continue meeting new demand when Cardano has no use for scaling and Ethereum has abandoned base layer scaling for admin key controlled scaling solutions. Solana is also scaling in more ways than one.
- Solana’s circulating supply has increased due to early investment unlocks and higher inflation. Early investments unlocks are winding down with some ecosystem exceptions, but the worst is over. Keep in mind Solana’s price performance even with increased circulating supply. Solana’s inflation is now hovering around 3.5% per year and it decreases 15% year over year until it reaches 1.5%. While Solana’s inflation is definitely on the higher side, simple native staking can offset it. This is in contrast to Ethereum where “staking” involves third-party trust and fees. Stake your SOL! Cardano’s staking setup more closely resembles Solana, but they have a finite supply. Cardano also has a high concentration of early investors. Probably on similar levels as Solana. It has just had an extra cycle to flush some ADA into new hands, but that doesn’t really matter if no one wants it.
- A recent change on Solana removed a burn mechanism attached to tipping to prevent side deals with validators, ensuring proper rewards and network health. A net positive fix. People realized they could tip outside the network to save by avoiding the burn. This hurt Solana’s incentives and reward mechanisms. A new burn to base level fees will need to be added for a more sensible approach. This will come. Solana’s monetary policies are still maturing, and will need to fall more in line with Ethereum’s aim to create a stable burn to emission ratio. Cardano has no plans for this the last I checked which could be considered a problem for maintaining future security with low activity. You can’t have no new emissions while capturing no transactions fees and expect network validators to keep securing the network in a trusted way.
- Wealth concentration in networks is common, and this isn’t unique to Solana. How much money are early investors of pre-mined ETH sitting on? How much did those initial asian investors receive in ADA? How much did whales purchase of all digital assets in bear markets? It’s a problem with wealth gaps. The FTX estate already has new buyers locked, and they are going to sell when they want just like they would with any asset. Institutional buyers have much stronger hands than your average crypto degen. Institutional interest isn’t always bad.
It’s almost absurd to have to address these claims with long format, but the reality is that not enough people understand these networks. Truth is, they all have their flaws, but they also excel in certain areas. Despite its imperfections, Solana is clearly leading in all metrics. Cardano is so far behind that it’s almost strange to compare the two. Sure, Cardano has strengths in decentralization design, but the fact that it still relies on admin keys doesn’t help their claims to superior decentralization.
SOL is consistently outperforming its competitors, capturing more activity and attracting developers from across the industry. Posts like these are often driven by those clinging to underperforming altcoins, desperate to justify their choices. Now, even some ETH maxis are starting to face similar concerns by not diversifying. Competition between Solana and Ethereum L2s is heating up.The fact is, if Cardano was faced with Solana’s level of activity, it would buckle under the pressure. It would be unusable. Cardano users are also entrusting their funds to admin keys, and as the network inevitably transitions to L2s, those admin keys will be difficult to shake. A situation not unlike Ethereum’s own L2 challenges.
Want the real reason for Dave’s post wrapped up in one image? Take a look at ADA’s price compared to SOL for the past 4 years:
https://preview.redd.it/vwzsnwzh1iid1.png?width=3369&format=png&auto=webp&s=aa0d40d854cb5602a2bc91f57d758d23da6565c6
