Solana block time changes: the pros and cons of validator latency strategies and industry governance breakthroughs

Original title: "Solana Validators' 'Slow Motion': Block Delay Becomes a New Strategy for Yield? 》

by Jack Kubinec

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

As Solana's code issues have been gradually resolved over the past few years, block time, the time it takes for the network to generate new transactional blocks, has decreased significantly, even below its nominal 400 milliseconds.

However, over the past month, an interesting trend has emerged: median block time, a key performance metric in blockchain networks that reflects how quickly blockchain networks process transactions and generate blocks, has slowered, and Solana has slowed down to add new transactions to the blockchain. The reason lies in a new validator strategy, which suggests that slow block generation may be more profitable. According to Blockworks, Anza, Jito, and Marinade are considering resolving the issue.

Each Solana block has a validator in the role of leader – responsible for collecting transactions, creating blocks, and broadcasting them to the network. Leaders charge transaction fees for creating blocks. More order flow means more fee opportunities, so validators may choose to process 500ms of transactions instead of 300ms to increase yield.

On a fundamental level, some Solana validators seem to be waiting as long as possible to package more transactions into blocks and thus maximize gains. This behavior has led to an increase in Solana's cycle length.

This is clearly not an ideal situation for a network committed to being as fast as Nasdaq. Additionally, reduced cycles mean fewer opportunities for compounding staking rewards, as suggested by Max Kaplan, CTO of Sol Strategies.

Solana offers a mechanism known as "grace ticks," which is a delay period that allows leaders to still be able to successfully commit blocks. This mechanism is designed to prevent unfair penalties for validators in remote locations, but it also opens the door for validators to intentionally delay submitting blocks.

Additionally, Solana's alternative client, Frankendancer, recently released a revenue-maximizing scheduler.

According to Kaplan, the validators running the client appear to be packing blocks at a slightly slower than normal rate. However, Kaplan added that Frankendancer's latency is negligible compared to more severe delayers, and he doesn't see it as a "bad thing." Moreover, block latency is not a new concept on proof-of-stake blockchains. However, the Firedancer upgrade could make this strategy more visible on Solana. Jump has not yet commented on this.

Interestingly, Firedancer software engineer Michael McGee described this phenomenon on this week's Lightspeed podcast. He mentioned: "One of the things we see in current validators is... [Validators] tend to create more profitable blocks by delaying transaction execution. ”

Blockworks Research analyst Victor Pham noted that Solana validators who are more pronounced in block delays typically run modified versions of the Agave-Jito client.

For example, in cycle 802 in mid-June, both Galaxy and Kiln had a median block time of over 570 milliseconds. According to Solana Compass data, some untagged validators are also running slower, while Temporal has a median validator block time of 475 milliseconds.

Kiln co-founder Ernest Oppetit acknowledged that its validators – the sixth-largest staking validator in the Solana network – had delayed block slots for a period of time but said it has now stopped doing so.

"At Kiln, we pride ourselves on offering the highest annual percentage yield (APY) on staking without sacrificing security. We have been working on different parts of the technology stack, including time strategy, and are in constant discussion with customers, client teams, and foundations. Currently, we follow the specification and no longer delay blocks, but many other validators are still doing so. We think we ultimately need to address incentives at the protocol level (rapid block generation leads to reduced rewards)," Oppetit said.

Ben Coverston, director of engineering at Temporal, said when asked about the apparent involvement of his validators in the slow block trend: "I can say that we are not the reason for making people aware of this phenomenon. ”

A Galaxy spokesperson said, "As a service provider, we support validator configurations that prioritize maximizing customer staking rewards. On Solana, this could mean proposing slightly slower blocks to ensure higher reward acquisition. Galaxy has also been responding to community feedback and has adjusted block times to acceptable limits. ”

However, the Solana validator community generally believes that slowing down the network is not appropriate, and slow validators are currently facing public backlash.

They may soon face more substantial punishment. According to Blockworks, Jito plans to blacklist slow validators from its staking pool, which is the largest in the Solana network.

Jito Foundation President Brian Smith said the organization is "drafting a governance proposal that will give a committee the power to remove laggards from the JitoSOL delegated collection." The proposal should be open to the community for discussion within a few days. ”

Michael Repetny, co-founder of Marinade, said the staking pool provider is "considering bringing this issue to a governance proposal to discuss the pros and cons of using [slow validators] as a hard rule/delegation policy violation." ”

Protocol-level solutions are also being promoted. Anza's GitHub repository shows a new proposal that proposes cutting Solana's grace tick period in half. Additionally, Solana's proposed consensus mechanism reforms are expected to address this issue.

"Alpenglow will solve this problem by enabling the skip voting feature," said Brennan Watt, vice president of core engineering at Anza.

In a recent episode of the Lightspeed podcast, Watt revealed that Anza hopes to bring Alpenglow to mainnet ahead of the Solana Breakpoint conference in December.

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