Solana’s ‘far too many red flags’ too much for this exec

Solana has been in the news a lot recently, both for good and bad reasons. It would seem, however, that the latter has caught the fancy of Cyber Capital’s Founder Justin Bons. He is in the news today after he tweeted a thread on the Solana blockchain. Via what many characterized as a rant against the Solana Foundation, the exec went on to say that Solana has “far too many red flags.”

Doubling down on the same, the exec highlighted the lack of originality of Solana while also calling it “reckless.” In fact, Bons also touched upon the Proof of History mechanism, claiming that it makes it easier for hackers to,

“Predict and therefore tack the next lock producers in-line. This attack also works regardless of scale, thereby severely reducing SOL security!”

Additionally, he argued that Solana is vulnerable to DDoS attacks, with Bons adding,

4/25) Instead in SoL it is possible to predict & therefore attack the next block producers inline

For instance attacking the next 100 validators inline instead of attacking the entire network

This attack also works regardless of scale, thereby severely reducing SOL security!

— Justin Bons (@Justin_Bons) April 14, 2022

Such criticism came on the back of a major outage back in early January 2022. This incident, in fact, was the third major network outage in a matter of months for a blockchain dubbed ‘Ethereum-killer’ by many.

Solana went down again at two o’clock in the morning (UTC+8) on January 4th. According to users of the official Telegram community, the attacker is suspected of using spam to conduct a DDoS attack.

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) January 4, 2022

What next for Solana?

Even so, there are still some Solana bulls who believe in the technology. In fact, many have grown optimistic thanks to the emerging importance of Solana in the NFT space.

At the time of writing, for instance, Solana only trailed Ethereum in terms of 24-hour NFT sales volume.

Despite all the criticisms, however, Solana officials are certain of the quality of the blockchain. They believe they don’t have to do anything that “sells the vision of the ‘execution layer for everything’ very short,” argued Solana Labs Co-Founder Raj Gokal.

Solana’s growth has fueled a host of predictions, with Gavin Smith, General Partner at Panxora Crypto, zeroing in on $250 based on SOL’s potential.

“We think that SOL is one of a few smart contract-based blockchains that have the technical architecture that will be difficult for Ethereum to compete with on the basis of transaction speed and transaction cost. For smart contract usage, especially in DeFi, these factors are a critical success indicator.”

According to FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried,

“Solana has a shot at becoming one of the core layers on which most financial and informational transfers happen between applications in a natively Web3 world.”