Firedancer devs want to remove Solana’s block limit to speed up network

Web3 infrastructure company Jump Crypto has proposed removing Solana’s fixed compute block limit to strengthen network performance and incentivize validators with suboptimal hardware to upgrade.

Jump, which is building a high-performance Firedancer validator client for Solana, is pushing for the SIMD-0370 proposal to be implemented sometime after the Alpenglow upgrade, Solana research company Anza said on Saturday. 

Alpenglow passed in a near-unanimous vote earlier this month and is set to be deployed on a testnet in December.

By removing static block caps, slower validators would skip more complex blocks, leaving them for better-equipped validators to handle, said Anza, a company spun out of Solana Labs: 

“This creates a performance flywheel: block producers pack more transactions to earn more fees. Validators that skip blocks lose rewards, so they upgrade hardware and optimize code. Better performance across the network means producers can safely push limits further.”

SIMD-0370 comes amid broader efforts to improve Solana’s network resilience and diversify its validator client base, with Firedancer launching on mainnet in September 2024 in a limited capacity. 

Solana has become a popular retail blockchain in recent years due to its high-speed, low-fee transactions and plethora of decentralized apps. Solana’s decentralized exchange trading volume has even flipped Ethereum’s on several occasions this year.  

However, sudden rises in network activity have led to network outages in the past, prompting the need for additional upgrades to ensure stability and a smoother user experience.

Earlier proposal aimed to raise the fixed block limit 

Solana’s fixed compute unit block limit is currently set at 60 million compute units. Without a fixed limit, the block size would scale based on how many transactions a validator could fit into a block. 

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The proposal comes four months after Jito Labs CEO Lucas Bruder pitched increasing the compute block limit to 100 million CU under SIMD-0286 in May.

Engineer raises concerns over centralization risks

While the proposal seeks to incentivize validators to upgrade hardware to earn more fees, it may create centralization risks, engineer Akhilesh Singhania said on GitHub:

“Another type of centralization that we might see is that if the bigger validators keep upgrading to more expensive hardware, the smaller ones who cannot afford to upgrade would be forced to drop out. So as a result, we might end up with fewer big validators.”

Alpenglow tipped to be Solana’s biggest protocol upgrade ever

Anza, which proposed the Alpenglow proof-of-stake consensus mechanism on May 19, said a successful implementation would be “the biggest change to Solana’s core protocol” and even position Solana to compete with current internet infrastructure.