Solana's slow validator meta is a pretty interesting yarn.
Here's what's happening, with exclusive details on how core Solana folks are attempting to fix things:
Solana leaders collect transactions, create blocks, and broadcast them to the network. Leaders make money from fees, and more order flow leads to more fees.
So, it could be more profitable to spend 500ms creating a block than 300ms, for example.
The Firedancer team released a revenue-maximizing scheduler that cause validators to produce slightly slower blocks with more profitable transactions.
Then, Solana validators with modified clients started producing more egregiously slow blocks. Think 600ms instead of 400ms.
Those validators — which seem to include Kiln, Galaxy, and Temporal, among others — saw a higher APY, but Solana had slower epochs, which is bad for staking rewards.
Under social pressure, some slow validators sped up again, and Solana's median block time went back under 400ms.
There's also behind the scenes work on preventing this behavior.
@JitoFDN is drafting a proposal to remove slow validators from its stake pool, I learned. @MarinadeFinance is considering taking similar action.
On top of this, Solana dev shop @anza_xyz is considering shrinking the network's "grace ticks" by half, which would give validators less time to be late and still produce a valid block.
And Alpenglow, which Anza hopes to have live by December, would solve the slow validator meta by enabling skip votes, @bw_solana tells me.
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