Lightspeed Newsletter Update on Solana

As issues with Solana’s code have been ironed out over the years, block times—defined as the duration it takes the network to produce a new block of transactions—have declined, sometimes dipping below Solana’s claimed level of 400ms.

However, an intriguing trend has emerged over the past month: Median block times have spiked, resulting in slower addition of transactions to the blockchain. This slowdown is attributed to a new strategy among Solana validators to produce blocks at a slower rate for more lucrative transaction fees. Anza, Jito, and Marinade are reportedly working on potential fixes to this issue.

Solana epoch lengths spiked in June. Source: Kamino

Every Solana block has a validator that acts as the leader—responsible for collecting transactions, creating blocks, and broadcasting them to the network. By delaying the production of blocks, validators can capture more transaction fees. This has caused Solana’s epoch lengths to increase, which is unfavorable for a network aiming for speeds akin to Nasdaq.

Consequently, the reduced number of epochs per year equates to fewer opportunities for staking rewards to compound, as highlighted by Sol Strategies’ CTO, Max Kaplan.

Solana employs a feature called “grace ticks,” which allows leaders to submit blocks during a late period, minimizing unfair penalties for validators in remote locations but also enabling purposeful delays.

The alternative Solana client Frankendancer has also recently introduced a revenue-maximizing scheduler, and validators using this client appear to be emitting blocks more slowly than usual, according to Kaplan. He noted that while the delays introduced by Frankendancer are minor, more significant instances of block delaying are also evident, especially post-Firedancer’s upgrade.

Michael McGee, firedancer’s software engineer, discussed this issue in a recent Lightspeed podcast, noting that validators can profit more by delaying transaction execution.

Validators noticeably extending block times tend to utilize modified versions of the Agave-Jito client, according to Blockworks Research analyst Victor Pham. For instance, during epoch 802 in mid-June, both Galaxy and Kiln recorded median block times exceeding 570ms.

Ernest Oppetit, co-founder of the sixth-largest validator Kiln, acknowledged that they had delayed slots previously but have ceased doing so. He emphasized the importance of maintaining high staking rewards without compromising security and voiced support for addressing the incentive issue at the protocol level.

Ben Coverston, engineering director at Temporal, clarified that their service prioritizes configurations that maximize staking rewards, implying that this might necessitate slightly slower blocks.

The Solana validator community is now expressing public disapproval of the slow block production, and slow validators might soon face stricter measures. Reports indicate that Jito plans to blacklist slow validators from its stake pool—Solana’s largest. Brian Smith, president of the Jito Foundation, shared that they are drafting a governance proposal to formally address the issue.

Michael Repetny, co-founder of the third-largest stake pool in Marinade, mentioned that they are contemplating introducing governance proposals to address the slow validators through a hard rule in the delegation strategy.