The Slower the Blockchain, the More Money? Solana Faces Validator Rent-Seeking Issue
Original Article Title: Behind the scenes of Solana's slow validator problem
Original Article Author: Jack Kubinec, Blockworks
Original Article Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow
As Solana's code issues have been gradually addressed over the past few years, block time (the time taken by the network to produce a new transaction block) has significantly decreased, even falling below its nominal 400 milliseconds.
However, over the past month, an interesting trend has emerged: the median block time (a key performance metric in a blockchain network reflecting the speed at which the network processes transactions and generates blocks) has spiked, slowing down Solana's addition of new transactions to the blockchain. This is due to a new validator strategy that suggests slower block generation may be more profitable. According to Blockworks, Anza, Jito, and Marinade are looking into addressing this issue.
Each Solana block has a validator serving as a leader – responsible for collecting transactions, creating a block, and broadcasting it to the network. The leader collects transaction fees by creating the block. More transaction throughput means more fee opportunities, so validators may opt to process transactions in 500 milliseconds rather than 300 milliseconds to increase their revenue.
At a fundamental level, some Solana validators seem to be waiting as long as possible to pack more transactions into a block, maximizing their earnings. This behavior has resulted in an increase in Solana's cycle length.
For a network committed to being as fast as Nasdaq, this is evidently not an ideal situation. Furthermore, a decrease in cycle length means a reduction in compounding 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 delay period that allows leaders to still successfully submit a block. This mechanism is designed to prevent validators in remote locations from being unfairly penalized but also opens the door for validators to intentionally delay block submissions.
Additionally, Solana's alternative client Frankendancer recently released a revenue-maximizing scheduler.
According to Kaplan, the validator running the client seems to be packing blocks at a slightly slower pace than usual. However, Kaplan added that compared to more severe delayers, Frankendancer's delay can be considered negligible, and he does not see it as a "bad thing." Furthermore, on a proof-of-stake blockchain, block delay is not a new concept. However, Firedancer's upgrade 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've seen in the current validators is...[validators] often create more profitable blocks by executing delayed transactions."
Blockworks Research analyst Victor Pham pointed out that Solana validators showing more obvious block delays typically run a modified version of the Agave-Jito client.
For example, in the mid-June 802nd epoch, both Galaxy and Kiln had median block times exceeding 570 milliseconds. According to Solana Compass data, some unmarked validators also have slower speeds, with Temporal's validator median block time at 475 milliseconds.
Kiln co-founder Ernest Oppetit admitted that its validator—the sixth-largest staked validator on the Solana network—had delayed block slots for a period 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 while not sacrificing security. We have been continuously researching various parts of the tech stack, including timing strategies, and engaging in ongoing discussions with customers, client teams, and the foundation. Currently, we follow the spec and no longer delay blocks, but many other validators still do. We believe that ultimately, the incentive issue (fast block generation leading to reduced rewards) needs to be addressed at the protocol level," Oppetit stated.
Temporal Engineering Director Ben Coverston, when asked about their validators apparently participating in the slow block trend, said, "I can say we are not the reason why people are aware of this phenomenon."
A spokesperson for Galaxy stated, "As a service provider, we support validator configurations that prioritize maximizing customer staking rewards. On Solana, this may mean proposing slightly slower blocks to ensure higher reward gains. Galaxy has also been responsive to community feedback and has adjusted block times to an acceptable range."
However, the Solana validator community generally believes that slowing down the network speed is not appropriate, and slow validators are currently facing strong public opposition.
They may soon face more substantive penalties. According to Blockworks, Jito plans to blacklist slow validators from its staking pool, which is the largest in the Solana network.
Jito Foundation Chairman Brian Smith stated that the organization is "drafting a governance proposal to empower a committee to remove 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 a governance proposal to discuss the pros and cons of considering [slow validators] as a hard rule/delegation policy violation."
Protocol-level solutions are also advancing. Anza's GitHub repository shows a new proposal suggesting halving Solana's grace tick period. Additionally, Solana's proposed consensus mechanism reform is expected to address this issue.
"Alpenglow will address this issue by enabling a skip vote feature," said Brennan Watt, Vice President of Core Engineering at Anza.
Watt revealed in a recent episode of the Lightspeed podcast that Anza hopes to launch Alpenglow on the mainnet before the Solana Breakpoint conference in December of this year.
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