Solana More Decentralized Than Ethereum, Founder Says

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has stirred up another debate about decentralization on social media. 

In his latest social media post, Yakovenko claims that Solana is already ahead of Ethereum when it comes to its distributed nature.

Moreover, according to the Solana founder, the upstart network might have already surpassed Bitcoin itself. 

“Solana is closer to Satoshi’s levels of decentralization than Ethereum. Maybe even past Satoshi at this point,” Yakovenko asserted.

The “laptop” debate 

Of course, Yakovenko’s provocative comment instantly attracted a lot of attention on social media. Solana would frequently face criticism due to its embarrassing downtimes caused by technical mishaps. 

However, the Solana co-founder pointed to Solana’s high hardware requirements as a barrier to entry. 

Yakovenko has stressed that anyone can run a Solana node on a laptop.

He is likely referencing the ability to run “Light Clients” or non-voting nodes that allow users to independently verify the state of the ledger without needing industrial-grade server racks. 

In late 2025, he argued that decentralization does not necessarily depend on the token distribution model. 

“My hot take is that any correctly constructed proof-of-stake network is sufficiently decentralized regardless of stake distribution or ownership or value,” Yakovenko stated in December 2025.

Last August, Yakovenko stated that Solana had and had always been decentralized.  “A permissionlessly run full node is all anyone needs to participate in any part of the stack.  There is no way for the rest of the network to steal the user’s funds, unlike a security council multisig.  That’s the difference,” he said back then.