“Solana is deceptively designed to falsely boost usage,” claims crypto researcher
CyberCapital founder and CIO Justin Bons heavily criticized Solana on Twitter, detailing its poor track record of downtime, bugs, hacks and scandals.
Founder and CIO of CyberCapital Justin Bons made some strong remarks about the Solana network and its native cryptocurrency (SOL) in a lengthy Twitter post published on October 3rd.
The crypto researcher said there was “obvious fraud” involved in the birth of SOL and discussed how there were false statements regarding the circulating supply of the cryptocurrency.
The entire Twitter thread heavily criticized Solana and its operations, citing “frequent downtime, errors, hacks and scandals.” Regarding SOL’s total value locked (TVL) and circulating supply, Bons had a lot to say. The researcher said “that the majority of SOL TVLs were fake” as “two developers pretended to be 10+ developers and count the same TVL over and over,” which “accounted for 70% of SOL’s $10B TVL at peak.”
Bons stated that the team said there was a circulating supply of 8.2 million SOL in April 2020, but that it was actually over 20 million SOL. He also referenced a third party finding an unlocked SOL wallet that had more than 13 million coins. The SOL team responded by saying that these were loaned to a market maker and promised to burn them within 30 days.
Bons provided a source that contained all the information he discussed. He says that the history of the project points to bad behaviour. Among these are lying about the circulating supply and transactions, a “deceptive design to falsely increase usage,” and the SOL ecosystem being “complicit in ‘falsifying’ peak TVL numbers.”
Reputation dented by power outages
Solana has experienced a number of network outages, which have created headlines and put the usability of the network under scrutiny. Most recently, the network was down for over three hours on October 1, which happened because a single validator created an invalid block. The manner in which the problem was resolved also attracted attention, pointing to a centralized decision being made.
The Solana network also went down on June 1 this year, when a transaction error halted the chain and led to a four-hour outage. Bons stated that this was also due to centralization problems.
Then a network outage was caused by arbitrage bot spam in January 2022. Solana also experienced several outages in late 2021, and this track record has not boded well for its reputation.
The Solana NFT market is growing
However, despite the series of negative events, the Solana ecosystem has grown steadily. The NFT market at Solana grew to a market share of 24% in September. The month saw over $135 million in transactions, with MagicEden dominating the volume with over 90% of the market.
This was despite Solana reaching an all-time low in NFT sales volume in July 2022. The ecosystem has managed to bounce back, but it remains to be seen if it will hold.
Disclaimer
All information on our website is published in good faith and for general information purposes only. Any action the reader takes on the information contained on our website is strictly at their own risk.
