Developer “0xZodomo” fired the first volley, warning that “a single Discord channel is capable of making sweeping changes to Solana consensus,” and accusing “wolves” of selling centralization as a feature. Lawyer Gabriel Shapiro (@lex_node) sharpened the satire, dubbing an imaginary one-node chain “gorbagana” and joking that the dumpster fire could be kept alive by a lone hold-out. Ethereum supporter “Etheraider” piled on, noting that Solana has averaged “an outage once every six months for the last four years,” an allusion to the seven documented halts the network has suffered since 2020.
Yakovenko, better known as “toly,” doubled down. If users “get a bunch of user nodes to follow your leader and only accept finality locally after double-spend synchronicity assumptions,” he quipped, “you are golden.” Fee stability, not perfect uptime, was his priority: “No fee spikes,” he wrote, arguing that retail users care more about predictable costs than about the 99th-percentile block-time metric that enterprise critics invoke. He later contrasted Solana’s throughput with the DTCC’s razor-thin revenue margins, adding, “What I care about is assets that move.”
That social layer is precisely what Yakovenko says keeps users safe: if consensus clients misbehave, any node may refuse the fork. Ethereum veterans counter that relying on ad-hoc coordination violates the very premise of permissionless decentralization. The debate is unlikely to cool as Solana’s footprint grows; the chain already processes 65,000 transactions per second in production loads and has been chosen by Visa for USDC treasury settlements, citing sub-cent fees and sub-second finality.
At press time, SOL traded at $160.56.
