Solana block time anomalies: The pros and cons of validators latency strategy and breaking the deadlock in industry governance

Original Title: "Solana Validators' 'Slow Motion': Block Latency Becomes a New Strategy for Earnings?"

Author: Jack Kubinec

Compilation: Deep Tide TechFlow

As the code issues of Solana have gradually been resolved over the past few years, the block time (i.e., the time required for the network to generate new transaction blocks) has significantly reduced, even below its nominal 400 milliseconds.

However, an interesting trend has emerged over the past month: the median Block time (a key performance metric in blockchain networks that reflects the speed at which the blockchain network processes transactions and generates Blocks) has surged, and Solana's speed of adding new transactions to the blockchain has slowed down. The reason lies in a new validators strategy, which suggests that slow Block generation may be more profitable. According to Blockworks, Anza, Jito, and Marinade are considering solutions to this issue.

Each Solana block has a validator acting as the leader – responsible for collecting transactions, creating blocks, and broadcasting them to the network. The leader earns transaction fees by creating blocks. More order flow means more fee opportunities, so validators might choose to process transactions with 500 milliseconds latency instead of 300 milliseconds to increase their earnings.

At a basic level, some Solana validators seem to be waiting as long as possible to pack more transactions into blocks, thereby maximizing profits. This behavior has resulted in an increase in the cycle length of Solana.

This is clearly not an ideal situation for a network dedicated to being as fast as Nasdaq. Additionally, the reduction in cycles means fewer opportunities for compound interest on staking rewards, as pointed out by Max Kaplan, the Chief Technology Officer of Sol Strategies.

Solana provides a mechanism called "grace ticks," which is a latency period that allows leaders to successfully submit Blocks. This mechanism is designed to prevent unfair penalties for validators in remote locations, but it also opens the door for validators to deliberately delay Block submissions.

In addition, Solana's alternative client Frankendancer has recently released a revenue-maximizing scheduler.

According to Kaplan, validators running the client seem to be packing blocks at a slightly slower than normal speed. However, Kaplan added that compared to more severe latency cases, the latency of Frankendancer is negligible, and he does not consider it a "bad thing." Additionally, block latency is not a new concept on proof-of-stake blockchains. However, the upgrade of Firedancer may make this strategy more prominent on Solana. Jump has not yet commented on this.

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

Blockworks Research analyst Victor Pham pointed out that those Solana validators that exhibit more noticeable latency in blocks typically run modified versions of the Agave-Jito client.

For example, in the 802nd cycle in mid-June, both Galaxy and Kiln had a median Block time exceeding 570 milliseconds. According to Solana Compass data, some unmarked validators were also operating slowly, while the median Block time for Temporal's validators was 475 milliseconds.

Kiln co-founder Ernest Oppetit acknowledged that its validators— the sixth largest staking validator in the Solana network— had latency in block slots for a period of time, but stated that this behavior has now ceased.

"At Kiln, we pride ourselves on providing the highest staking Annual Percentage Yield (APY) in the market without sacrificing security. We have been conducting research and development on various parts of our tech stack, including time strategies, and maintaining ongoing discussions with clients, client teams, and the foundation. Currently, we adhere to the specifications and no longer delay blocks, but many other validators still do. We believe that ultimately, the incentive issues (rapid block generation leading to reduced rewards) need to be addressed at the protocol level," said Oppetit.

Temporal Engineering Director Ben Coverston, when asked about the obvious involvement of its validators in the slow block trend, stated: "I can say that we are not making people aware of the reasons behind this phenomenon."

A spokesperson for Galaxy stated: "As a service provider, we support a validators configuration that prioritizes maximizing customer staking rewards. On Solana, this might mean proposing slightly slower blocks to ensure higher reward acquisition. Galaxy has also been responsive to community feedback and has adjusted the block time to an acceptable range."

However, the Solana validators community generally believes that slowing down the network speed is inappropriate, and the slow validators are currently facing strong public opposition.

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

Brian Smith, the chairman of the Jito Foundation, stated that the organization is "drafting a governance proposal to empower a committee to remove the laggards from the JitoSOL delegation pool. This proposal should be open for community discussion in a few days."

Michael Repetny, co-founder of Marinade, stated that the staking pool provider is "considering submitting this issue as a governance proposal to discuss the pros and cons of making [缓慢验证者] a hard rule/delegation strategy violation."

Solutions at the protocol level are also being advanced. Anza's GitHub repository shows a new proposal suggesting to shorten Solana's grace tick period by half. Additionally, the consensus mechanism reform proposed by Solana is expected to address this issue.

"Alpenglow will address this issue by enabling the skip voting feature," said Brennan Watt, Vice President of Core Engineering at Anza.

Watt revealed in the latest episode of the Lightspeed podcast that Anza hopes to launch the Alpenglow mainnet before the Solana Breakpoint conference in December this year.

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