Edward Snowden, a well-known whistleblower and privacy advocate, made harsh comments about Solana during the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore. Once you have delivered yours speechtitled “The Next Threat to Speech,” Snowden participated in a question-and-answer session during which he criticized Solana’s architecture, expressing concerns about its centralized nature and the types of projects it facilitates.

Answering the question: “How do we design technology from the ground up so that we know it is safe?” Snowden took the opportunity to compare Bitcoin’s adversarial design with what he sees as Solana’s more vulnerable, centralized system.

“When you look back at the Bitcoin white paper, I think you see an adversarial approach to the system. And that’s what needs to be taken into account,” Snowden said. At first without mentioning SOL’s name directly, he quickly moved on to criticize the network, stating: “I don’t want to name names, but Solana has good ideas and they are just going in the right direction. What if we just centralized everything? It will be faster, it will be more competent, it will be cheaper and yes, sure, you’re right, but no one uses it except for meme coins and scams.

Snowden then explained his deeper concerns, emphasizing that Solana’s centralization could expose it to government control or other forms of outside intervention. “If anyone puts something significant on this and then all the states start moving in that direction, it will be a system that has levers that people can just take away,” Snowden warned, signaling the potential risk of significant censorship or seizures in the future.

His main argument was the need for adversarial thinking when designing decentralized systems, especially given the growing attention that cryptocurrency platforms are receiving from governments and regulators around the world. “You have to think about an adversarial case, not a comfortable, uncomplicated case at the beginning. That means thinking about how he’s going to be attacked and making sure he can survive it,” he said.

Reaction from the Solana community

Snowden’s comments did not go unnoticed, and key figures in the SOL ecosystem quickly responded. Mert Mumtaz, co-founder and CEO of Helius Labs, a Solana-based project, approached X in defense of the network, disputing Snowden’s claims. “Snowden appears to believe that Solana is centralized, but provides no data to support it,” Mumtaz wrote.

He called on critics to provide concrete evidence of a vulnerability in Solana that would allow a single entity to control the network or put users’ funds at risk. “I challenge anyone to show me the exact attack vector that would allow a single entity to lose funds or extend its power over the network,” Mumtaz continued, further emphasizing the geographic distribution of Solana nodes and the diversity of jurisdictions within which they operate.

He acknowledged that while Bitcoin and Ethereum are more decentralized, that does not inherently mean Solana is susceptible to the type of centralized control Snowden mentioned. “Here’s what you can say instead: Ethereum and Bitcoin are more decentralized than Solana – that’s true. Usain Bolt is faster than Lebron James in the 100m dash, but that doesn’t mean Lebron is slow. The only possible single point of failure would be a single customer,” Mumtaz wrote.

He highlighted the latest changes in Solana’s client diversity, pointing to the implementation of “frankendancer” on the mainnet, as well as the upcoming “Firedancer” client, which decentralizes the network even further. He concluded his rebuttal by saying, “If the network is this centralized, it’s worth tens of billions – attack it if you can!”

At the time of publication, SOL was trading at $143.

Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com