Solana Decentralization crisis? validators highly rely on the foundation's stake support, if they withdraw their investment, could it collapse?

The Solana Blockchain is reigniting the controversy over Decentralization. Recently, a community data reveal astonishing insights: "More than half of the validators heavily rely on the staking support from the Solana Foundation," and if the foundation withdraws its investment, it could lead to a network shutdown. This issue has sparked extensive discussions within the community and has prompted a reevaluation of Solana's claims of "high speed and decentralization."

Are validators overly reliant? A chart reveals the structural risks of Solana.

DeFi researcher Kydo shared a chart provided by infrastructure Helius showing that most Solana validators stake as much as 90 to 100% from the Solana Foundation.

so here’s an interestng thing about Solana:

most validators only exist because the Solana foundation “spawned” them

each bar on the chart equals one validator, and the height shows the percentage of total stake that is coming from the foundation

the data is a bit old, but it’s… pic.twitter.com/2aQRhpSTQY

— Kydo (@0xkydo) April 24, 2025

According to Helius research, once the foundation terminates its stake support, approximately 57% of the nodes will be unable to continue operating due to lack of funds, which could lead to a collapse in overall network stability:

What is more concerning is that this data does not take into account the high export costs required for hardware, operation and maintenance (DevOps) and high-throughput Blockchain, and the actual impact may be even more severe.

Foundation adjusts policy: reduce support, promote validators to be self-reliant.

In response to this issue, the Solana Foundation announced on April 23 a revision of its validators' stake policy ( Solana Foundation Delegation Program, SFDP ). Helius CEO Mert commented on this:

Solana will gradually remove nodes that have long relied on staking and lack external support in the future, to encourage nodes to be more self-sustaining.

This move aims to enhance the true level of decentralization of the network and attempts to correct the long-term structural dependence of Solana nodes on the foundation.

However, Kydo still bluntly pointed out that the Solana officials have long used the number of nodes as a decentralization indicator, and now the authenticity of these data may need to be re-evaluated. He also named the Solana officials and community for their lack of patience in the face of criticism and their quick retaliatory attitude, which is merely evading the issue.

(Solana's significant proposal SIMD-228 did not pass, and the SOL token issuance mechanism remains unchanged)

Kydo: Ethereum is too kind, calling for attention to the competitor issue.

Furthermore, Kydo believes that the Ethereum community has not thoroughly investigated this issue with Solana, partly because the Ethereum Foundation is "too friendly," while Ethereum's L2 solutions are busy competing with each other and have no time to pay attention to Solana. In contrast, Solana actively researches Ethereum's weaknesses to seek advantages in the competition:

Ethereum has over 800,000 validators, compared to Solana's only about 2,000 nodes, clearly demonstrating a higher degree of Decentralization.

He urged the Ethereum Foundation and the L2 teams to investigate the node structure of Solana in depth, understand the possible weaknesses of their competitors, and publicly apply pressure to dispel concerns.

With questioning and reform coexisting, how far can Solana go?

Kydo finally expressed a philosophical statement, hoping that cryptocurrency participants can thoroughly study Solana and the so-called "active measures (active measures)" they mentioned:

What we see is only the surface of reality, which is perception. Digging deeper, you will find endless problems. Politics, finance, technology, and even cryptocurrency—all are essentially the same.

This incident reminds developers and investors that the promise of Decentralization should not be superficial. Whether the policy adjustments of the Solana Foundation can truly bring about change remains to be seen, but this discussion about Decentralization cannot be ignored.

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