Solana reaches new milestone- Is it time for investors to go long

Amid crypto market bearish turmoil, Solana’s active validator count has reached an impressive figure of 1,875 recently. This goes on to show how this blockchain is far more secured and decentralized than others in the crypto industry.

What’s more impressive is that Solana touched a count of 1,000 active validators just over a year ago.

Source: Medium

This means that Solana now has the most active validators among all proof-of-stake blockchains besides Ethereum, which has 8,417 nodes and 409k validators.

Interestingly, the validator count on Solana has increased massively since the launch of the mainnet beta.

Source: Medium

However, there is a pressing concern among Solana validators in their geo-diversity. Almost half of the validators are located in the U.S. and Germany.

According to a blog on Messari, “If too many validators are concentrated in the same places, the health of a blockchain becomes reliant on the regulatory regimes of those countries.”

Another important aspect of a healthy blockchain is the distribution of staked tokens among those validators. In comes the “Nakamoto coefficient” which is defined as the smallest number of validators who cumulatively stake 33% of the network’s staked tokens.

A higher coefficient value would mean a higher distribution of staked tokens. Hence, this represents a higher degree of decentralization.

Source: Medium

Solana has a Nakamoto coefficient value of 27 which is higher than most blockchains besides Polkadot. But in hindsight, Polkadot has only 15% as many validators as Solana.

There’s more in the house

That being said, Solana co-founder tweeted about the launch of the Testnet v1.10.32 on 26 July. Users have been visibly excited about this launch as it continues to fix bugs on the network which has seen multiple outages recently.

Nevertheless, the Solana network has managed to perform well in the past quarter. Despite both internal and external headwinds, Solana’s network received major upticks in many areas. It has even managed to retain loyal users over the period in review here.

Testnet @solana validatoooooors! It's time to check discord.https://t.co/lZjdgZl8cQ

— SMS T◎Ly, ?? (@aeyakovenko) July 25, 2022

Now, you might ask- what can we expect now for Solana? The health of the network has been a major criticism in terms of network outages. But recent server improvements can signal an upturn in fortunes for this Ethereum-killer.