Solana, beyond the extreme hardware requirements to run a node, is deeply economically centralizing. It's more or less a standard delegated proof of stake stake system with one nasty twist - validators have to pay transaction fees to vote. At current sol prices this is about $100,000/year. This has some very big implications in a dpos system. In dpos, a validator gets validation slots proportional to their delegation and staking level, and you earn the transaction fees paid in those slots. More delegation, more slots, more fees earned from users and from other validators voting on the correctness of the chain. The net effect is that if your validator has a delegation level below the average of all the validators, you will bleed out your capital over time to validators that have an above average delegation. To add a nastier twist to this, the Solana foundation in their generosity, contributes delegation out of their Sol allocation to validators that they like. Essentially, the foundation gets to decide who will be a profitable validator and who won't.