Just wanted to highlight the great work done by the Solana Compass dev recently. For the LamportDAO Sandstorm Hackathon they updated their Solana Decentralization dashboard and it is awesome!
Currently Solana is looking good, with 3112 total nodes, a 30 nakamoto coefficient, its hosted in 32 unique countries, in 210 unique cities in 396 unique data centres. From a staking perspective there are 292668 total Solana stakers.
Geographic Distribution of Solana Validators around the Earth
A beautiful global map has been prepared showing this off geographically…
The United States, France, Netherlands, Germany & Canada are the top 5 countries with Solana Validators right now.
What’s amazing to see is the sheer growth of the number of Solana Validators over time. Even with the recent bear market and FTX implosion the validators are holding.
We wrote about all the validators back in June 2020 and it is simply amazing to see the growth in validator count, country representation, organisation/individuals & dashboards/tooling.
Fast forward 2.5 years and we have a couple of validators in Rio, South America but surprisingly, none in South Africa or Australia!
Solana Validator Growth Over Time
Thanks to the excellent tech stack at Solana and ultimately the promise, that it will serve the demand for low fees and highly available sub-second block space, Solana adoption has continued to grow over the past 2 years.
Growth has been slow and steady over a Blockchain only a couple of years old.
The distribution of stake is also growing slowly with the Nakomoto Coefficient at 30 at time of writing. As a decentralised proof of stake network, this number tells us the minimum amount of validators that are needed to collude or be compromised to take over control of the blockchain. The bigger the better for this metric, as it becomes more and more unlikely for a large amount of individuals/organisations to be aligned.
As mentioned by Solana Compass, there is still a small amount of top heavy validators like Jump Crypto and a16z, who have 5x the average stake assigned to them. Jump are building their own validator client called Firedancer so that is to be expected.
Check out the Solana Compass Decentralisation Dashboard
Solana Compass have a lot of Dashboards! Check out their website for the latest. Some noteable dashboards for Solana statistics are:
- Solana Decentralisation Dashboard
- Solana Performance + TPS
- Solana Block Summary Explorer
- Solana Fee Tracker
- Solana Staking Statistics
- Solana Tokenomics
- Solana Staking Pools
- Solana Stake Changes this Epoch
How Can Solana Get More Validators?
If you interested in helping secure the Solana Network go check out the official Solana validator page! They also help new validators get online by incentivising the required stake you need with their Delegation Program.
With Firedancer quickly approaching and already showing test results of 0.6 million TPS, its gonna be an exciting year for the blockchain that aspires to “Consensus at the Speed of Light”. LFG
