Anatoly Yakovenko declares Solana surpasses Ethereum and approaches Bitcoin's level of decentralization

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko continues to spark debate about the level of decentralization on social media.

In his latest post, Yakovenko claims that Solana has now surpassed Ethereum in terms of decentralization. He even suggests that the network may have reached a level of decentralization equal to — or greater than — Bitcoin.

“Solana is getting closer to Satoshi-era decentralization than Ethereum. It might even have surpassed Satoshi’s level at this point,” Yakovenko stated.

Debate Around “Laptops”

This provocative statement quickly drew significant attention from the community. Previously, Solana had been criticized multiple times for outages caused by technical glitches, raising questions about the network’s stability and true decentralization.

In response, Yakovenko emphasized that high hardware requirements do not necessarily constitute a barrier to decentralization. He affirmed that anyone can run a Solana node on a personal laptop.

Most likely, he is referring to the ability to run a “light client” or a non-voting node, allowing users to verify the ledger’s state without needing large-scale enterprise servers.

By the end of 2025, Yakovenko argued that decentralization does not necessarily depend on token distribution models. “My view is that any proof-of-stake network properly designed is sufficiently decentralized, regardless of stake distribution, ownership, or value,” he wrote in December 2025.

Earlier, in August of the same year, Yakovenko also asserted that Solana “has been and always will be decentralized.” According to him, operating a full node without permission is sufficient to participate in all layers of the system. “There’s no way for the rest of the network to seize user assets, unlike a multisig model of a security council. That’s the difference,” he emphasized.