Solana validators face trade-offs between yield and efficiency: Are delayed blocks a new trend?

Recently, the Solana network has seen a striking phenomenon: the median block time has significantly increased, and the speed at which new transactions are added to the blockchain has slowed down. This trend stems from new strategies adopted by some validators, who have found that delaying block generation may be more profitable.

In the Solana network, each Block is managed by a validator acting as the leader. The leader collects transaction fees by creating Blocks. Therefore, some validators choose to extend latency to pack more transactions into a Block, thus maximizing profits. This practice has resulted in an increase in the cycle length of Solana.

For a network dedicated to high-speed operation, this is clearly not an ideal state. Additionally, the reduction in cycles also means that the compounding opportunities for staking rewards are decreased. Solana offers a "graceful tick" mechanism that allows leaders to successfully submit blocks within a certain latency period. This mechanism was originally designed to protect remote validators, but it also provides the possibility for intentional delays in block submission.

Recently, some validators' clients have started to launch income-maximizing schedulers. The validators of these clients seem to be packing blocks at a slightly slower than normal speed. However, compared to more serious latency issues, the latency of these clients is negligible.

Some analysts point out that those Solana validators with obvious latency blocks typically run modified clients. For example, during a certain period in mid-June, the median block time of some large validators significantly exceeded 570 milliseconds, while the network standard is 400 milliseconds.

Some validators admitted to having participated in the practice of latency blocks but stated that they have stopped this behavior. They emphasized that the incentive issue needs to be resolved at the protocol level, as fast block generation leads to reduced rewards.

However, the Solana validators community generally believes that slowing down the network speed is inappropriate. Some large staking pool providers are considering blacklisting slow validators or discussing how to address this issue through governance proposals.

At the protocol level, there are also some solutions being advanced. Proposals suggest shortening the latency period for Solana, and the consensus mechanism reforms proposed by Solana are also expected to address this issue. Some development teams hope to launch a new consensus mechanism by the end of this year to completely resolve this problem.

This situation highlights the trade-off between the pursuit of efficiency and ensuring the profitability of validators in blockchain networks. How to provide sufficient economic incentives for validators while maintaining the efficient operation of the network has become an important challenge faced by the Solana ecosystem.