Solana has had one of the most dramatic comeback stories in the history of cryptocurrency, having been controversial since its inception. But now it should no longer bear the brunt of infamy. From the notorious FTX collapse to false usage metrics, centralized design, and outage issues, Solana has gone through many tribulations, yet has grown stronger amidst adversity. It has genuinely changed and forced us to change our perceptions of it. Many are keen to sing Solana's praises; in reality, we should really change our damned biases.

I must admit, I bear partial responsibility for this view because for many years, I was one of Solana's harshest critics. However, today's Solana is vastly different from its past. Because of this, in 2023, I transitioned from a critic to a supporter of Solana.

In this article, we will dissect all my past criticisms and demonstrate how Solana has improved and why it now deserves our support. Changing perspectives for the sake of decentralization and our shared crypto values is not weakness but a superpower.

Outages Issues

Solana has experienced multiple outages, which indeed deserves our serious criticism, as a mature blockchain should theoretically never experience outages.

However, it cannot be denied that Solana's stability has been continuously improving. The key here is whether the technological changes at the technical level can give us sufficient reasons to be confident in the future stability of its network.

Let's take a closer look at the past failures and their root causes. The uptime charts for 2021 and 2022 were really terrible:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: Solana Status

On September 14, 2021, Solana's network was down for over 20 hours. Due to excessive node memory usage, restoring network operations was extremely difficult. On June 1, 2022, Solana was down for over 4 hours again, this time due to a transaction vulnerability, causing the entire network to come to a standstill. On October 1, 2022, Solana was down for over 3 hours due to invalid blocks causing a chain split.

I won't elaborate on each Solana outage, as there are detailed records elsewhere. In summary, it was a severe test for Solana, and its condition was extremely poor at the time, with vulnerabilities emerging from all directions. If it were still in that state today, I would definitely still hold a critical attitude. But on the contrary, after each issue was resolved, it became stronger. Next, let's look at the subsequent situation:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: Solana Status

In the following year, there was a significant improvement compared to the previous period, although not perfect, the progress was truly remarkable. These outages were mostly related to Solana's lack of a mature fee market. The implementation of the fee market during this period was one of the main reasons I switched to support Solana, as it paved the way for perfect stability in the coming years:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: Solana Status

However, Solana still has other issues: congestion, spam, RPC failures, network bottlenecks, etc. For a blockchain with a continuously high usage volume, these are normal growing pains. Importantly, there were no outages, which is a huge improvement compared to previous years, indicating that Solana is maturing.

False TPS Metrics

Next, let's talk about false usage data: When I first pointed out this issue in 2021, Solana had almost no real usage. So claiming to reach 40,000 TPS was a complete lie.

Since then, Solana has cleaned up these inaccurate information in its external communications, no longer boasting about TPS; in fact, Solana's leadership is much more honest in external communications now.

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Even today, TPS data may still be misleading. According to the most conservative estimates, the adjusted numbers are still extremely impressive. Let me calculate in detail, first is the original TPS, which is currently 4247:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: Solana Compass

Now we exclude voting transactions, leaving only 1109 TPS, for the sake of argument, we can also exclude "failed transactions."

So, 4247 original TPS - voting transactions = 1109; then exclude "failed transactions" (calculated at -40%) = 665.

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: Dune Analytics

This adjusted usage is still much higher than the total of all other blockchains today.

This makes Solana the undisputed leader in the field of decentralized applications. This is also the reason why some criticisms seem unfair at present; they make it seem as if Solana is not leading in usage, but the facts clearly show that even with the most conservative estimates, it is leading.

Moreover, excluding "failed transactions" is not entirely reasonable because these transactions were destined to fail and still had to pay fees. These transactions are mainly driven by seasoned participants who essentially make double payments to get their transactions included in blocks faster, expecting most to fail. This does not reflect the transaction failure rate of ordinary users; according to my own tests, the failure rate of ordinary users is below 0.2%, which is completely reasonable.

But for the sake of argument, even excluding failed transactions, Solana still stands out.

False TVL Metrics

TVL data also had similar issues, sometimes exaggerated:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Fortunately, with the adjustment of the ecosystem, these are just growing pains, and now TVL metrics are more fair, although not perfect, but under the current statistical methods, no blockchain is perfect. At least it can be said that all blockchain ecosystems are continuously applying the same standards.

Solana's TVL still reaches an impressive $6 billion and is growing rapidly, with a bright future:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: DeFiLlama

Revenue

Even with the repeated high income from L1 and DApp, many people still refuse to face the reality.

Many do not understand that revenue metrics cannot be faked because Solana is already decentralized enough to ensure this.

The reason is that to "fake" these fees, the "manipulators" would have to pay all the fees themselves. Because ultimately no one can control which validators will receive these fees, the "manipulators" are essentially paying for all the fees, making fee revenue impossible to fake.

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: DeFiLama

If anyone thinks that Solana's founders spend up to $5 million a day to "fake" fee revenue, then I really don't know what to say to such people, this has already fallen into a conspiracy theory. Maybe I should suggest these people review their investment portfolios to see if bias is at play.

It can be said that revenue is the most important metric because it proves the actual use cases of cryptocurrencies while providing a solid, sustainable foundation for future decentralization and security.

Dangerous Design Trade-offs

Some of Solana's design decisions, such as Proof of History (PoH) and the Turbine mechanism, did sacrifice a certain degree of decentralization in pursuit of speed. I have to face this issue, what does this mean? In fact, it lowers the threshold for attacks.

Roughly estimated, it may have reduced by about 20%. Despite this, it is only a slight weakening of economic security. Because this allows attackers to perform a DDoS on a subset of validators, making them leaders, thus reducing the amount of tokens needed to launch a "51% attack". I explained this in more detail in my previous criticism:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: Screenshot from "Critique of Solana: Lies, Fraud, and Dangerous Trade-offs" article

Nevertheless, Solana's market cap is still three times that of its closest L1 blockchain competitor, even with this trade-off, Solana remains much safer.

This specific trade-off, is it worth it? It's hard to say.

However, it can be determined that Solana is not insecure today, and it has ultimately achieved a balance. Because in reality, Solana is much safer than its competitors with a market cap closer to it.

Decentralization is a concept involving many interacting factors. For example:

A high-capacity blockchain with 10,000 nodes running on supercomputers is more decentralized than a low-capacity blockchain with only 100 nodes running on Raspberry Pis.

This is an extreme example, but it highlights my point. This is why, despite Solana's higher node requirements and centralized design decisions, in terms of scale, it is actually very decentralized. Because scale plays a significant role in actual decentralization. Solana has achieved this view by widely distributing stakes among 1

Solana has had one of the most dramatic comeback stories in the history of cryptocurrency, having been controversial since its inception. But now it should no longer bear the brunt of infamy. From the notorious FTX collapse to false usage metrics, centralized design, and outage issues, Solana has gone through many tribulations, yet has grown stronger amidst adversity. It has genuinely changed and forced us to change our perceptions of it. Many are keen to sing Solana's praises; in reality, we should really change our damned biases.

I must admit, I bear partial responsibility for this view because for many years, I was one of Solana's harshest critics. However, today's Solana is vastly different from its past. Because of this, in 2023, I transitioned from a critic to a supporter of Solana.

In this article, we will dissect all my past criticisms and demonstrate how Solana has improved and why it now deserves our support. Changing perspectives for the sake of decentralization and our shared crypto values is not weakness but a superpower.

Outages Issues

Solana has experienced multiple outages, which indeed deserves our serious criticism, as a mature blockchain should theoretically never experience outages.

However, it cannot be denied that Solana's stability has been continuously improving. The key here is whether the technological changes at the technical level can give us sufficient reasons to be confident in the future stability of its network.

Let's take a closer look at the past failures and their root causes. The uptime charts for 2021 and 2022 were really terrible:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: Solana Status

On September 14, 2021, Solana's network was down for over 20 hours. Due to excessive node memory usage, restoring network operations was extremely difficult. On June 1, 2022, Solana was down for over 4 hours again, this time due to a transaction vulnerability, causing the entire network to come to a standstill. On October 1, 2022, Solana was down for over 3 hours due to invalid blocks causing a chain split.

I won't elaborate on each Solana outage, as there are detailed records elsewhere. In summary, it was a severe test for Solana, and its condition was extremely poor at the time, with vulnerabilities emerging from all directions. If it were still in that state today, I would definitely still hold a critical attitude. But on the contrary, after each issue was resolved, it became stronger. Next, let's look at the subsequent situation:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: Solana Status

In the following year, there was a significant improvement compared to the previous period, although not perfect, the progress was truly remarkable. These outages were mostly related to Solana's lack of a mature fee market. The implementation of the fee market during this period was one of the main reasons I switched to support Solana, as it paved the way for perfect stability in the coming years:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: Solana Status

However, Solana still has other issues: congestion, spam, RPC failures, network bottlenecks, etc. For a blockchain with a continuously high usage volume, these are normal growing pains. Importantly, there were no outages, which is a huge improvement compared to previous years, indicating that Solana is maturing.

False TPS Metrics

Next, let's talk about false usage data: When I first pointed out this issue in 2021, Solana had almost no real usage. So claiming to reach 40,000 TPS was a complete lie.

Since then, Solana has cleaned up these inaccurate information in its external communications, no longer boasting about TPS; in fact, Solana's leadership is much more honest in external communications now.

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Even today, TPS data may still be misleading. According to the most conservative estimates, the adjusted numbers are still extremely impressive. Let me calculate in detail, first is the original TPS, which is currently 4247:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: Solana Compass

Now we exclude voting transactions, leaving only 1109 TPS, for the sake of argument, we can also exclude "failed transactions."

So, 4247 original TPS - voting transactions = 1109; then exclude "failed transactions" (calculated at -40%) = 665.

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: Dune Analytics

This adjusted usage is still much higher than the total of all other blockchains today.

This makes Solana the undisputed leader in the field of decentralized applications. This is also the reason why some criticisms seem unfair at present; they make it seem as if Solana is not leading in usage, but the facts clearly show that even with the most conservative estimates, it is leading.

Moreover, excluding "failed transactions" is not entirely reasonable because these transactions were destined to fail and still had to pay fees. These transactions are mainly driven by seasoned participants who essentially make double payments to get their transactions included in blocks faster, expecting most to fail. This does not reflect the transaction failure rate of ordinary users; according to my own tests, the failure rate of ordinary users is below 0.2%, which is completely reasonable.

But for the sake of argument, even excluding failed transactions, Solana still stands out.

False TVL Metrics

TVL data also had similar issues, sometimes exaggerated:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Fortunately, with the adjustment of the ecosystem, these are just growing pains, and now TVL metrics are more fair, although not perfect, but under the current statistical methods, no blockchain is perfect. At least it can be said that all blockchain ecosystems are continuously applying the same standards.

Solana's TVL still reaches an impressive $6 billion and is growing rapidly, with a bright future:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: DeFiLlama

Revenue

Even with the repeated high income from L1 and DApp, many people still refuse to face the reality.

Many do not understand that revenue metrics cannot be faked because Solana is already decentralized enough to ensure this.

The reason is that to "fake" these fees, the "manipulators" would have to pay all the fees themselves. Because ultimately no one can control which validators will receive these fees, the "manipulators" are essentially paying for all the fees, making fee revenue impossible to fake.

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: DeFiLama

If anyone thinks that Solana's founders spend up to $5 million a day to "fake" fee revenue, then I really don't know what to say to such people, this has already fallen into a conspiracy theory. Maybe I should suggest these people review their investment portfolios to see if bias is at play.

It can be said that revenue is the most important metric because it proves the actual use cases of cryptocurrencies while providing a solid, sustainable foundation for future decentralization and security.

Dangerous Design Trade-offs

Some of Solana's design decisions, such as Proof of History (PoH) and the Turbine mechanism, did sacrifice a certain degree of decentralization in pursuit of speed. I have to face this issue, what does this mean? In fact, it lowers the threshold for attacks.

Roughly estimated, it may have reduced by about 20%. Despite this, it is only a slight weakening of economic security. Because this allows attackers to perform a DDoS on a subset of validators, making them leaders, thus reducing the amount of tokens needed to launch a "51% attack". I explained this in more detail in my previous criticism:

From Skeptic to Fan: Cyber Capital's Founder Explains His Love for Solana

Source: Screenshot from "Critique of Solana: Lies, Fraud, and Dangerous Trade-offs" article

Nevertheless, Solana's market cap is still three times that of its closest L1 blockchain competitor, even with this trade-off, Solana remains much safer.

This specific trade-off, is it worth it? It's hard to say.

However, it can be determined that Solana is not insecure today, and it has ultimately achieved a balance. Because in reality, Solana is much safer than its competitors with a market cap closer to it.

Decentralization is a concept involving many interacting factors. For example:

A high-capacity blockchain with 10,000 nodes running on supercomputers is more decentralized than a low-capacity blockchain with only 100 nodes running on Raspberry Pis.

This is an extreme example, but it highlights my point. This is why, despite Solana's higher node requirements and centralized design decisions, in terms of scale, it is actually very decentralized. Because scale plays a significant role in actual decentralization. Solana has achieved this view by widely distributing stakes among 1