Written by Lostin, Helius Compiled by Yangz, Techub News
As of Epoch 685, Solana has 4514 nodes, including 1414 validators and 3100 RPCs. No validator controls more than 3.2% of the stake.
The Nakamoto Coefficient (NC) represents the minimum number of independent entities that can maliciously collude to invalidate validity and refuse to reach the consensus required for the production of new blocks. Solana's Nakamoto Coefficient is currently 19, but the actual number may be lower because a single entity can operate multiple validators anonymously.
Solana's validators are located in 37 countries and regions. The largest number of validators is concentrated in the United States, with a total of 508. In addition, four jurisdictions each account for more than 10% of the share, with the United States accounting for 18.3%, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom each accounting for 13.7%, and Germany accounting for 13.2%.
68% of the stake is delegated to validators in Europe, with 50.5% of the stake delegated to validators within the EU (excluding Norway, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom). In addition, 20% is delegated to North America.
Validators are spread across 135 different hosting providers. The two leading providers are Teraswitch, a private US company that provides hosting services to validators, and Latitude.sh (formerly Maxihost), a Brazilian company that provides low-cost bare metal servers to validators, accounting for a combined 24% share, and Latitude.sh (formerly Maxihost), a Brazilian company that provides low-cost bare metal servers to validators, accounting for a combined 19% share.
The Agave client codebase has 357 individual contributors. The Firedancer client is being developed by a small team led by Chief Science Officer Kevin Bowers and currently has 57 contributors.
The Jito client, a fork of the original Agave codebase that includes an extra-protocol auction for blockspace, currently holds a dominant share of the network at 88%. However, expect this to change significantly over the next 12 months as the new Firedancer client is gradually introduced and integrated into the ecosystem.Solana and Ethereum are currently the only L1s that offer multiple client implementations.
Major changes to Solana’s core components are subject to a formal, public Solana Improvement and Development (SIMD) proposal process. The most significant protocol changes, especially those affecting economic parameters, are subject to a governance vote. Three such votes have taken place to date.
Founded in June 2019, the Solana Foundation is a Swiss-registered non-profit organization dedicated to developing and supporting the Solana ecosystem. The Foundation has a relatively lean team of 60-65 full-time employees who oversee funding for grants, delegation programs, and developer tools.
In addition, the geographic diversity of the Solana developer community has been strongly demonstrated. The most recent hackathon event "Radar" attracted 13,672 participants from 156 countries, with high participation from India, Nigeria, the United States, and Vietnam. SuperTeam, a network connecting Solana creatives, developers, and operators, has expanded to 1,300 members in 16 countries.
Decentralization can be summarized as the absence of a single point of failure within a system. This multi-faceted concept involves multiple aspects, including token distribution, influence of key figures, participation in permissionless networks, development control, and software/hardware diversity. Beyond Balaji’s Satoshi Coefficient, there are few universally accepted standards for quantifying the decentralization of a blockchain. Many of the metrics are imperfect. Furthermore, discussions around blockchain decentralization are often rooted in political philosophy, sparking deep ideological debates that sometimes border on religious. Solana’s decentralization has been criticized by some in the blockchain community, who believe that Solana lacks decentralization and censorship resistance. A recent example is former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who voiced his concerns during his keynote at the Token2049 conference. However, like many of Solana’s critics, Snowden did not provide any data to back up his claims, despite being publicly invited to do so. In the following sections of this article, we will analyze Solana’s decentralization with data, highlighting where the network demonstrates relatively strong decentralization while pointing out areas where further progress is needed.
Through this report, we will take a quantitative and multifaceted approach to analyzing Solana’s decentralization, grounded in facts and publicly verifiable information. We will evaluate the following aspects:
Staking Distribution
Geographic Distribution of Nodes
Diversity of Custodians
Diversity of Client Software
Diversity of Developers
Governance Processes and Entities
Where appropriate, we will compare Solana’s metrics to other PoS L1s. To be clear, peer networks serve only as benchmarks to provide broader context for Solana’s decentralization journey and highlight areas where it may be lagging or exceeding expectations. These comparisons should not be misconstrued as attempts to claim one network is superior to another. In many cases, Ethereum provides the most useful benchmark, as it is widely considered the most decentralized PoS L1. Notably, Ethereum’s genesis block was mined in July 2015, while Solana’s genesis block was mined in March 2020. Decentralization is dynamic, and blockchains generally become more decentralized over time. Given similar conditions, it is reasonable to expect older chains to be more decentralized.
The stake distribution of a blockchain network refers to how the network’s native tokens are distributed among validators. In a well-distributed system, no single validator or small group holds an excessive share of the stake, and the risk of any one entity gaining undue influence or control over the network consensus is reduced. A balanced stake distribution ensures a diverse set of validators, which promotes decentralization and makes it difficult for any malicious actor to undermine the integrity of the network. It also helps with fault tolerance as the network becomes more resilient to single validator failures. “You need a very large validator set, and on an intuitive level, the larger the validator set, the more secure the network is, and on an academic level, the larger the node set, the easier it is to guarantee that you, as the honest minority in the set, always have a minimum spanning tree that can reach each other. This is not even referring to the protocol layer, but to people talking on the phone. In fact, people can go into Discord or IRC, or talk to each other on their phones. And that’s where we solve the split problem and find out what the problem is. The more people we have, the easier it is to guarantee that splits are impossible.” - Anatoly Yakovenko, Breakpoint 2024 Running a node on Solana is completely permissionless and requires a very low mandatory minimum stake (1 SOL) to run as a validator. The network natively supports delegated proof of stake (dPoS) and consists of 4,514 nodes, including 1,414 validators and 3,100 RPC nodes. The two largest validators by stake are operated by Helius and Galaxy, each holding about 3.2% of the stake. The minimum delegated stake required to enter the top third and top two thirds is 4.4 million SOL and 1.23 million SOL, respectively. 
For greater clarity, the figure below groups validators by delegated stake. Of these, 82 validators (5.87% of the total) hold more than 1 million delegated SOL; 825 validators (59.1% of the total) hold less than 50,000 delegated SOL, and most of them participate in the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP), which is designed to help smaller validators quickly achieve sustainable development. About 72% of Solana validators benefit from SFDP support, and these validators account for 19% of the total stake. For a deeper discussion of SFDP, please refer to our earlier Helius report: "SFDP and the Challenges of Long-Tail Validators". Just as blockchain addresses are not equivalent to users, the number of validators does not reflect the true number of different entities operating validators. The true number is lower because large entities may choose to distribute their stake across multiple validators. For example, Jito (1,2), Coinbase (1,2), and Mrgn (1,2) operate multiple validators. There is no inherent problem with a single entity operating multiple validators; in fact, as long as the validators are distributed rather than centralized, they can strengthen the network by increasing the diversity of geographies and hosting providers. However, this can create risks if these validators are configured identically with non-standard setups or firewall rules. Additionally, having a single entity manage many validators on behalf of large companies or projects as part of a "validator as a service" model can introduce further decentralization issues.
In a proof-of-stake network, the Nakamoto Coefficient represents the minimum number of nodes required to control at least one-third of the total stake. A higher coefficient indicates a more widely distributed stake and a higher degree of decentralization. Additionally, it can also be thought of as the minimum number of independent entities that can maliciously collude to cause a validity failure, thereby denying the consensus required for new block production. PoS-based and Byzantine Fault Tolerant blockchains require more than two-thirds of the staked nodes to reach consensus on the state of the network in order to proceed with transaction processing. To determine Solana’s Satoshi coefficient, we ranked validators from highest to lowest in terms of stake share and calculated the number of validators required to control one-third of the total stake. As a result, Solana’s Satoshi coefficient peaked at 34 on August 13, 2023, and currently stands at 19. The coefficient has been relatively stable over the past year. 
Compared to similar networks in the industry, Solana’s Satoshi coefficient ranks in the middle. However, the above data does not take into account the situation where a single entity can anonymously operate multiple validators, so the true Nakamoto coefficient may be lower. 
Geographic diversity of network nodes is critical to reducing risk and promoting the anti-fragility of the network. If too many validators are concentrated in one region, the resilience of the network will depend on the regulatory framework of those specific jurisdictions. Natural disasters, including earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and tsunamis, pose another risk. Such events can put pressure on national power grids and severely disrupt the operation of data centers, causing sudden outages. Man-made threats, such as war, cyberattacks and damage to critical Internet infrastructure (including undersea cables), also pose risks that endanger the stability of the network. The Solana data used for this section’s analysis comes from 685 epochs from validators.app. A spreadsheet of the original dataset is available here. The data reflects only staked validator nodes and does not include unstaked RPC nodes.
By continent, the data shows that 632 Solana validators (46%) are located in Europe and 550 (40%) are located in North America. In terms of stake distribution, 68% of stake is delegated to validators in Europe and 20% to validators in North America. Of this, 50.5% of stake is delegated to validators operating within the European Union (excluding Norway, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom). 
In contrast, Ethereum’s staking distribution is similar, but North America has a higher weight at 34.4%. 
Solana’s validators are spread across 37 different countries and regions. The largest concentration is in the United States, with 508 validators (37%) running in U.S. data centers, followed by 112 validators in the Netherlands (8%) and 111 validators in Russia (8%). 
When measuring validators by stake share, the distribution is more even. Four major jurisdictions each account for more than 10% of the share, with the United States accounting for 18.3%, followed by the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, both at 13.7%, and Germany at 13.2%. 
In contrast, Ethereum nodes are distributed in 83 different countries and regions, with nearly half of them located in the United States and Germany. 
A more detailed analysis of validator and delegated stake distribution by city shows that Solana validators are distributed in 121 cities around the world. Specifically, in the United States, validators are distributed across all major regions, including 35 cities in total. The most popular cities are Chicago (124 validators, 2.3% stake), Los Angeles (57 validators, 2.3% stake), and New York (32 validators, 3.5% stake). 
Earlier this year, Anza employee Rex St. John proposed improving Solana strategy for geographic diversity of validators (particularly by expanding support for operators in the Global South) and identified several key challenges:
Higher latency: Nodes in remote areas have difficulty keeping up with the network
Bandwidth costs: Bandwidth costs are very high in some regions
Regulatory restrictions: Laws implemented in different jurisdictions limit the feasibility of blockchain infrastructure operations
Underdeveloped infrastructure: Inadequate network and data center infrastructure
Unfavorable taxes and tariffs: High hardware equipment costs
Talent shortage: Lack of local Solana expertise and limited access to capital required for staking
Ideally, validator sets should be hosted by multiple independent providers, rather than relying heavily on a few centralized providers. This diversification is critical to reducing the risk of network outages or censorship from any single provider. A notable incident in 2022 involved German hosting provider Hetzner, which accidentally removed Solana validators from its service, causing more than 20% of active staking nodes (approximately 1,000 validators) to go offline within hours. Despite this, Solana remained fully operational with no outages. Most of the affected validators were successfully migrated to new data centers within a few days, and almost all staking nodes were back online within a few weeks. 
Solana validators are spread across 135 different hosts, led by Teraswitch, a private US company that hosts 24% of validators, and Latitude.sh (formerly Maxihost), a Brazilian low-cost bare metal server provider that hosts 19%. Together, these two providers account for 43.4% of the share. Other popular hosts include French cloud computing company OVHcloud, which holds an 8.65% share, and Lithuania-based Cherry Servers, which holds an 8.45% share. 
As a high-performance, high-throughput blockchain, Solana has higher node requirements than most industry peers. Hardware recommendations for Solana validators include the following key components:
CPU: 24 cores/48 threads or above, 4.2GHz base clock speed or faster
Memory: 512 GB
Disk: PCIe Gen3 x4 NVME SSD or higher, 2TB combined or larger. High TBW
No GPU Required
In practice, Solana’s bandwidth requirements make home operations impractical, so validators are primarily run by bare metal servers in dedicated data centers.
Solana launched with a single validator client written in Rust, developed by Solana Labs. While the Solana Labs client is no longer actively updated, a forked version called Agave is still in use. Complete reliance on a single client implementation is a sign of centralization, as it introduces the risk of critical software bugs that could invalidate the effectiveness of the entire network. Increasing client diversity has been a priority for the Solana community, and with the launch of Firedancer, that goal has finally been achieved.
Currently, multiple Solana client proposals are either live or in development:
Agave: A fork of the original Solana Labs client, written in Rust and maintained by Solana software development company Anza.
Firedancer: Maintained by Jump Crypto, it is a complete rewrite of the original client in C.
Frankendancer: A hybrid validator that combines Firedancer’s networking stack and block production components with Agave’s execution and consensus.
Jito: A fork of the Agave client built by Jito Labs that introduces an off-protocol blockspace auction to provide more economic incentives for validators through tipping.
Sig: Syndica’s read-optimized Solana validator client written in Zig.
In addition, Mithril is a client written in Golang and developed by Overclock that can be used as a validating full node with lower hardware requirements. Having multiple full-time core engineering teams reviewing each other’s codebases greatly increases the likelihood of finding bugs while promoting knowledge sharing and collaboration. “We learned a lot from the Firedancer client team; they came up with a lot of really smart solutions,” Anza engineer Joe Caulfield noted in a recent interview. In addition, both Agave and Firedancer have launched bug bounty programs.
Solana and Ethereum are the only L1s that offer multiple client implementations. Ethereum has at least five major software clients. The most widely adopted are Nethermind, written in C, with 45% usage, and Geth, written in Go, with 39% usage. On Solana, the Jito client currently accounts for 88% of staked nodes. However, this landscape is expected to change significantly over the next 12 months as new clients (Frankendancer and Firedancer) are gradually introduced and integrated. 
In the book "Quantitative Decentralization", Balaji believes that developer decentralization is a key factor in the blockchain ecosystem, emphasizing the importance of minimizing dependence on individual contributors and reducing "key person risk". All core client software on Solana is publicly hosted on GitHub under an open source license, allowing open access and community contributions. Agave validators maintained by Anza, a software development company founded in early 2024, play an important role in this field. Anza had about 45 employees when it was founded, about half of Solana Labs' previous workforce. In addition to managing Agave, the Anza team also contributes to the broader Solana ecosystem by developing projects such as token expansion, cross-border payment infrastructure, and Solana permissioned environment.
The Agave client code base has 357 contributors and 26,408 commits, but the data is not perfect in terms of raw commit counts and cannot fully reflect the depth of individual contributions. It is worth noting that most of the commits are written by a small number of developers, mainly senior engineers and Solana co-founders, in addition to a long list of small contributors. 
In contrast, popular Geth and Nethermind clients on Ethereum also show similar "centralization" patterns of contributors in the larger community. Geth has 1,098 contributors, while Nethermind has 142. Among them, more than half of Geth's commits are attributed to three core contributors. Among all Nethermind's commits, two developers contributed more than 50%.
The Firedancer client is developed by a small team led by Kevin Bowers of Jump, a well-known high-frequency trading company in the United States, and currently has 57 contributors and 3722 commits. Given that Firedancer is a relatively new project (the first commit dates back to August 2022) and was only recently launched on the mainnet, the diversity of contributors is still limited. 
Within the broader Solana ecosystem, the developer community is undeniably geographically diverse. Solana’s biannual online hackathon is one of the most well-attended events in the world, and has played an important role in fostering today’s most successful Solana protocol and application teams, including Tensor, Drift, Jito, and Kamino. The most recent “Radar” attracted 13,672 participants from 156 countries, with India, Nigeria, the United States, and Vietnam particularly represented. 
In addition, Superteam, a network connecting Solana creatives, developers, and operators, has now expanded to 1,300 members in 16 countries. Its localized chapters promote collaboration by hosting events and shared workspaces. Separately, the Solana Allstars Ambassador Program, run by Step Finance, has been a huge success in Nigeria, with more than 120 well-attended meetups in many regions.
Governance is an important vehicle for decentralization because it determines how decisions are made within the network. This affects everything from protocol upgrades to economic policies and community rules. Decentralized governance enhances transparency, fairness, and trust in the network.
A Solana Improvement and Development (SIMD) Proposal is the formal documentation required for any substantive changes to Solana core components. “Substantive” changes here are defined as those that generally alter the network protocol, transaction validity, or interoperability. Non-substantive changes, such as minor code refactorings or objective performance improvements, do not require a proposal. While SIMD submissions do not require any permission and can be submitted by any developer or researcher, most SIMDs are submitted by client team developers working full-time on core protocol improvements. SIMD has two types of proposals:
Standards proposals: impact Solana core functionality (such as consensus, networking, and API interfaces)
Meta proposals: involve processes or guidelines outside the codebase
SIMDs typically go through stages such as idea review, drafting, review, and acceptance. The formal review happens publicly on GitHub, and the proposal author is responsible for collecting feedback from the relevant core contributors, who decide whether to accept, modify, or withdraw the proposal. Authors are not obligated to implement their proposals, but are generally encouraged to do so as it is the best way to ensure successful completion of the proposal. If a proposal is accepted, it will usually include an associated feature implementation tracking issue and may need to be activated through Solana's feature-gate mechanism. Feature gates are activated first on Testnet, then on Devnet, and finally on Mainnet, based on timelines. Discussions on improvements occur in the following areas:
SIMD (Solana Improvement Document) Github repository
sRFC (Solana Request for Comments) section of the Solana official forum
Solana Technical Discussions
Social channels, including X (formerly Twitter) and Telegram
SIMDs that are significant changes to the protocol, especially those that impact economic parameters, are subject to a governance vote. The Solana governance voting process is a relatively new initiative, spearheaded by long-time members of the validator community, and focuses only on critical issues to maintain engagement and avoid governance fatigue. To date, three such votes have taken place, including:
The first advisory vote in October 2023 (14.3% of staked nodes participated)
SIMD33 in April 2024 on timely voting points (53% of staked nodes participated)
SIMD96 in May 2024 on paying full priority fees to validators (51% of staked nodes participated)
Voting is conducted via tokens deposited into each validator identity account, with each account receiving tokens proportional to its active stake share in lamport. To vote, validators need to transfer tokens to one of several designated public keys corresponding to voting options (including the option to abstain). Once a vote is cast, it cannot be changed. In this structure, SOL token holders participate only indirectly, delegating their SOL holdings to validators who vote to select validators that align with their values or preferences.
Solana is one of only four AA-rated assets among the top 40 digital assets assessed on environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria, according to a benchmark report released by CCData earlier this year. Solana ranked fourth among L1s in the report’s governance rating, which factors in stakeholder engagement, transparency and decentralization. 
Founded in June 2019, the Solana Foundation (SF) is a Swiss-registered nonprofit organization dedicated to the decentralization, adoption, and security of the Solana ecosystem. With an initial treasury of 167 million SOL tokens, SF oversees funding for grants, delegation programs, and developer tools. It controls official brand assets, social media accounts, websites, and trademarks. Currently, SF is led by Executive Director Daniel Albert and President Lily Liu, and is operated by a relatively lean team of 60-65 full-time employees, supervised by the Foundation’s Board of Directors. The Foundation's mission is to build a scalable, self-sustaining Solana ecosystem with a focus on education, research, and ecosystem development initiatives. SF organizes large-scale Solana events, including Hacker Houses and the annual Breakpoint conference, to promote developer engagement and community building. The SF Developer Relations team is responsible for maintaining official documentation, social channels, and developer education. In January 2024, SF handed over management of the flagship hackathon to Colosseum, a new independent accelerator co-founded by former SF Growth Director Matty Taylor. Dan Albert pointed out in a recent debate: "Our job is to get ourselves out of the work, find scalable ways to support the network and the ecosystem, and then let it go." This shows that SF's long-term goal is to build a network that can sustain itself without supervision.
As described in this article, Solana’s decentralization is comparable to or even better than its peers in the industry on many key metrics, including the Satoshi coefficient, geographic distribution of validators and staking nodes, developer decentralization, and governance benchmarks, while client diversity is currently a clear issue, which the new Firedancer client aims to address. To strengthen Solana’s decentralization, consider the following areas:
Explore options for distributing SF responsibilities across multiple organizations
Increase transparency around Foundation spending and grant allocations
Develop initiatives such as “Solana Nations” to increase geographic diversity
Reduce the largest expense for validator operators, which is voting costs
Explore strategies to reduce validator data export requirements; data export costs are significantly higher for validator operators outside the EU and US
Encourage more active participation in governance voting
Expand Solana’s core contributor and research communities to strengthen the network
Currently, the Solana validator set remains somewhat concentrated in the US and EU and relies on a limited number of hosting providers. While this challenge is not unique to Solana, it highlights the potential for improvement in Solana to reduce centralization at this level. Finally, thanks to Overclock, Amira Valliani, Matt Sorg, Yelena Cavanaugh, Dan Albert, Tim Garcia, 0xIchigo, Anatoly Yakovenko, and Brady Werkheiser for reviewing earlier versions of this article.
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