Solana can press a button to Shutdown
Solana can shutdown the network with the press of Button.
No, they can’t.
The most recent misinformation piece is going around started from a parody post saying that Caroline Ellison claimed FTX developers would turn off Solana to liquidate longs. The post quickly became viral with prominent crypto personalities falling for the misinformation, like Max Keiser and
The Head of Developer Relations of the Solana Foundation, Jacob Creech, stated on X (Formerly Twitter), that there is a $400K reward for anyone that can find code that potentially turn off Solana.
Solana is one of the most decentralized blockchains, however it has not been an easy year for Solana, as each piece of misinformation pushes people further away from the truth, and unfortunately from the network. Lets take a look at data from our recently released Q3 report that highlights some of the many metrics that have undoubtedly proved how Solana is truly more decentralized than most blockchains.
Decentralization Metrics
NAKAMOTO COEFFICIENT
The Nakamoto Coefficient measures the minimum number of validators or nodes that would need to collude for censorship, or prevent a blockchain from operating correctly. The larger the Nakamoto Coefficient is compared to the number of nodes or validators, the more decentralized the blockchain network is.
Solana leads the Nakamoto Coefficient among major L1s with a 31 NC, followed by Avalanche and Ethereum, with 27 and 20 respectively.
As per the most recent data, the Solana Network has a total of 2,919 nodes operating in 392 different data centres located in 31 countries.
NETWORK STABILITY
Solana has repeatedly suffered criticism over network instability, outages, and congestion. Although in the past it has suffered from periods of instability, the network has drastically improved with recent patches aiming to solve several of these issues.
Per Solana Status, the last outage was recorded on February 25th, lasting 18 hours and 50 minutes. After the outage, Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana, assured that throughout 2023, the network instability issues would be patched and fixed permanently. So far, data shows that this might be the case, as Solana has not experienced a single network problem since then.
Solana has had a 100% uptime in the last eight months.
STAKE DISTRIBUTION
Solana is well distributed geographically, with no single country having over 33.3% active stake.
DEVELOPER ACTIVITY
Developer activity is critical for blockchain projects because it indicates how active, innovative and engaged the ecosystem is. It ensures the blockchain's reliability, fosters innovation, and supports a thriving ecosystem. Developer activity also enhances transparency and promotes interoperability making it a vital metric for assessing a blockchain's health and potential.
Solana is the fourth largest network by active developers with 1475, a number 20 times higher than what was speculated by unverified sources in early 2023. Ethereum is the largest network with 5946 active developers as of June 1st, followed by Polkadot and Cosmos, with 1923 and 1685, respectively.
Measuring active developers across all blockchain is often a controversial topic with several sources publishing either inaccurate or biased data. Most notably, Token Terminal's highly meme'd claim that Solana only has 75 active developers in the ecosystem. Solana's active developer numbers often seem undercounted across most sources, when taking into account the 10k+ signups for Solana's Q1 GRIZZLYTHON Hackathon and the 5k+ signups for Hyperdrive Hackathon in Q3.
CONCLUSION
Solana is resilient, decentralized, has a large community of developers and no, it does not have a button to shutdown.