SINGAPORE – During the final debate of this year’s Solana Breakpoint crypto conference on Saturday, Solana Foundation Executive Director Dan Albert and the CEO of venture capital firm RockawayX, Viktor Fischer, probed the case for the Solana Foundation’s abolition, and also for its preservation.
The Solana Foundation, set up at the launch of the blockchain’s mainnet, is distinguished in the network’s ecosystem as the only entity that did not earn its SOL, Albert said.
One in eight SOL tokens minted was earmarked for the foundation, a portion of SOL’s supply set aside during its token genesis event for operations, grant funding, and staking programs, each aimed at developing the blockchain aspiring to become the first “decentralized Nasdaq.”
That allocation has irked some in the Solana community, a point that Albert was quick to raise as the debate got under way.
“Everybody else, including everyone here [and] everybody who has a stake in the network – in Solana – had to put something on the line – labor, talent, capital – in hopes of some success,” Albert said, eyeing members of the audience.
“The Solana Foundation operates in reverse,” he said. “We received our funding at the outset, and have to endeavor to make retroactively the value of trust put in us by the network worth that cost. But is it worth the cost?”
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Tear It Down
Although Albert said he wanted to see the price of SOL soar, he said such growth in the token’s value would not correlate to a proportional increase in the foundation’s headcount and costs without the entity becoming bloated and dysfunctional.
“The Solana Foundation’s relative importance in the ecosystem can be defined, and I think this is an incredibly healthy development,” he said. “And to extrapolate that to its natural conclusion, when the ecosystem can do everything that the foundation can do and more, that’s a job well done.
“Rather than this organization clinging to life indefinitely, I think it’s only right to consider moving forward with its dissolution,” he said. “There’s no way that … any single organization like the foundation can or should grow its headcount and its costs to support proportionally that growth without becoming some inefficient, bureaucratic monstrosity,” he said, noting that the foundation currently employs around 65 full-time staff.
Albert said the Solana ecosystem as a whole is approaching the point at which an entity other than the foundation might be willing to commit resources to the network without expecting a return.
He said a team maintaining a community of validators or a firm with a multibillion-dollar, profit-driven business model built on Solana might have an economic incentive “to make sure that the network remains performant and decentralized and secure, and that developers can come [to it].”
Albert pointed to the Solana Foundation Delegation Program as an example of the foundation’s redundancy. He said that even though the program is beneficial and helpful, “[its engagement] is no longer existentially important to the Solana network, nor to the community, and I think this is an incredible sign of maturation.”
Fischer volunteered a more prosaic reason why the foundation might best be dissolved: the possibility that the nonprofit’s allocation of SOL tokens might be burned.
“Burning tokens would be good for SOL owners,” he said.
Hold the Line
Fischer said, however, that the dissolution of the foundation would be a net negative because it helps to provide a strategic direction for the network and the values that coalesce around it.
“[The] Solana Foundation is like a family,” he said.
He also said the foundation’s dissolution would mean a loss of kinship of the sort shown by the number of hackathons and hacker houses that took place even amid the depths of the crypto winter last year.
“This ‘love,’ I think, is maintained by the Solana Foundation, and that’s why we need [it] to stay,” he said.
And if love weren’t reason enough, Fischer said, what about the pragmatic need for safety?
“[The] Solana Foundation] needs to protect us from, for example, censorship,” he said, referring to discrimination and subversion, and also to the regulatory zeal of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which classifies the SOL token as a security, making it subject to rules and restrictions.
“Who’s going to protect us? I hope it will be the foundation,” he said.
Fischer also highlighted the foundation’s importance when it comes to providing financial resources for the network’s ongoing development, as it remains a key source of sponsorship, grants, and capital within the ecosystem.
“[The] Solana Foundation’s Delegation Program is delegating roughly 70 million SOL tokens to 70% of validators,” he said. “There was a study by Helius that was done in August [showing that] if we stop the Solana Foundation Delegation Program, 60% of delegators will not be profitable anymore”
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Finally, both executives raised the issue of coordination and cohesion in the context of markets, regulation, and the institutional players in the TradFi universe.
“Governments, PayPal, and Franklin Templeton … need someone to call, and we need that governance/coordination entity,” Fischer said.
Albert found himself in agreement with his debate rival, saying that the need for a neutral, coordinating entity in the Solana ecosystem would persist for a long time.
“While not existentially important, it’s a tremendous accelerant to the continued growth that we’re seeing in Solana,” he said.
