Solana News Today: Solana Validators Slow Block Production to Maximize Yield
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Aime SummarySolana, a blockchain network known for its high-speed transaction processing, has recently faced an issue with its validators producing blocks at a slower rate than usual. This trend, which emerged over the past month, has led to an increase in median block times, causing the network to add new transactions to the blockchain at a slower pace. The root of the problem lies in a new strategy among some Solana validators who have found it more lucrative to produce blocks slowly, thereby maximizing their yield. Validators such as Anza, Jito, and Marinade are reportedly working on solutions to address this issue.
Every block on the Solana network has a designated validator who acts as the leader, responsible for collecting transactions, creating a block, and broadcasting it to the network. Leaders collect transaction fees from the blocks they create, and more order flow means more fee opportunities. Therefore, it can be more profitable for validators to process a larger volume of transactions, such as 500ms worth, compared to a smaller volume, like 300ms. This strategy has led to an increase in Solana’s epoch lengths, which is not ideal for a network aiming to match the speed of the Nasdaq. Additionally, fewer epochs per year mean fewer opportunities for staking rewards to compound for stakers, as noted by Max Kaplan, the chief technology officer of Sol Strategies.
Solana offers a feature called “grace ticks,” which allows leaders to submit blocks successfully during a late period. This feature is designed to prevent validators in distant locations from being unfairly penalized but also enables validators to intentionally delay block submission. The alternative Solana client Frankendancer recently released a revenue-maximizing scheduler, which has led validators running the client to pack their blocks more slowly than usual. Kaplan clarified that the delay caused by Frankendancer is minimal compared to more significant delays and that block delaying is not a new concept on proof-of-stake blockchains. The Firedancer upgrade may have brought this strategy to light on Solana.
Michael McGee, a software engineer at Firedancer, described the phenomenon on the Lightspeed podcast, noting that validators can often make more profitable blocks by delaying the execution of transactions. Validators running modified versions of the Agave-Jito client have been more noticeably delaying blocks. For instance, during epoch 802 in mid-June, Galaxy and Kiln’s median block time was higher than 570ms each, and Temporal’s validators had 475ms median block times. Kiln co-founder Ernest Oppetit admitted that the validator had been delaying slots but stated that it has since stopped doing so. Oppetit emphasized that Kiln prioritizes offering the top staking APY without compromising security and is in constant discussions with customers, client teams, and the foundation on this issue.
Temporal engineering director Ben Coverston stated that the validator’s participation in the slow block trend was not the reason people became aware of the issue. Galaxy, another validator, also acknowledged that it had increased block times to within an agreeable threshold in response to community feedback. The Solana validator community has expressed disapproval of the slowdown, and slow validators are now facing public backlash. Jito plans to blacklist slow validators from its stake pool, which is Solana’s largest. Jito Foundation president Brian Smith announced that the organization is drafting a governance proposal to empower a committee to remove laggards from the JitoSOL delegation set. Michael Repetny, co-founder of the third-largest stake pool in Marinade, also mentioned that the pool provider is considering a governance proposal to discuss the pros and cons of introducing slow validators as a hard rule/offense of the delegation strategy.
Help is also on the way at the protocol level. Anza’s GitHub repository shows a new proposal to shrink Solana’s grace tick period by half. Additionally, Solana’s proposed consensus overhaul, known as Alpenglow, is expected to address this issue by enabling skip votes. Brennan Watt, vice president of core engineering at Anza, stated that the company hopes to have Alpenglow live on the mainnet by Solana’s Breakpoint conference in December. This development is anticipated to resolve the current issues with block production on the Solana network.
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