On 10 August 2022, Solana Foundation released a detailed report about the health of its validator network, via a tweet thread. The report talks about the validator count, distribution, and other security metrics—a discussion that resurfaced after the recent hack of Slope wallets on the Solana platform.
1/ Today, the Solana Foundation released its first report on the health of the permissionless @Solana Validator Network. https://t.co/1jsylk9J3J
The report dives into the validator network and key metrics the Foundation tracks to assess its health.
🧵
— Solana Foundation (@SolanaFndn) August 10, 2022
Despite facing the heat for network outages and a more-than-needed centralization, Solana has been addressing the health of its mainnet validator network rather aggressively. Solana has added 3,400 validators across six continents. It also included over 1,900 nodes for consensus—making the network more resilient to attacks.
Why did Solana release the report now?
On 3 August 2022, Solana wallets experienced a multi-million dollar hack. As usual, people started blaming the Solana ecosystem, only to realize that the Slope wallet compromise was to blame for this wallet-wide hack. Since then, Solana has been aggressively talking about ecosystem security and this report finally lets the users look at the spread of nodes and validators—which eventually points to breach resistance.
What does the report say?
The report suggests that the Solana mainnet isn’t as vulnerable as people make of it. Instead, Solana has a Nakamoto Coefficient of 31 (as of 8 August 2022), which means that at least 31 nodes should be compromised (should collude) to alter block production. Currently, only Avalanche (28) comes close to Solana as far as the Nakamoto Cofficeint is concerned. The likes of Cosmos and Near stand at 7 each.
Reports like these seem to be helping in educating users about the pros and cons of using Solana. Despite the occasional bad news, the SOL’s month-on-month performance— a 27% uptick—has been off the charts.
Read the report here:
