Headline: Solana founder pushes back after viral claim that 84% of validators disappeared — says real drop is ~20% and tied to subsidy end A weekend social-media post that went viral claimed Solana had lost 84% of its validators, sparking fresh debate about the blockchain’s decentralization. Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko fired back, calling the 84% figure misleading and saying the true decline in active validator participation is about 20% over the past 12 months. Key clarifications from Yakovenko - Validators vs. full nodes: Yakovenko emphasized that the viral post mixed up validators and full nodes — “Validators are not full nodes.” That distinction matters because the two play different roles in network operation and health. - Full-node counts: Yakovenko said Solana runs roughly 5,000 full nodes, versus about 8,300 on Ethereum, a network with roughly four times Solana’s market capitalization. - Cause of the drop: He attributed the fall in validator numbers largely to the end of the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP), a one-year bootstrap subsidy that covered voting costs for small validators. With the program concluded, some smaller operators naturally stopped validating. Costs and the decentralization debate Critics continued to voice concerns about centralization even after the clarification. A widely circulated claim that operating a validator costs $20 million per node could not be independently verified and appears exaggerated. That said, running a self-hosted, fully validating Solana node is not trivial. Industry reports and node operators say: - Hardware can start in the low hundreds of dollars but often reaches into the thousands for production-grade setups. - Voting and operational expenses can push annual costs into the tens of thousands of dollars for many validators. - Some professional validators stake millions of dollars in SOL and spend hundreds of thousands on operations. Efforts to broaden participation Several startups are working on solutions designed to let individuals verify Solana on consumer-grade hardware and home internet connections. Those products are still in alpha testing, but they aim to lower the technical and cost barriers to running nodes. Bottom line The dramatic “84%” claim appears to be overblown and rooted in a conflation of different node metrics. Still, the broader conversation about how affordable and distributed validator participation should be remains active — especially as subsidy programs end and projects work to make verification more accessible. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news

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