Developers Suggest Eliminating Solana’s Block Limit to Enhance Performance

Jump Crypto, a Web3 infrastructure company, has suggested eliminating Solana’s fixed compute block limit to enhance network performance and encourage validators with less capable hardware to upgrade.

Jump, which is developing a high-performance Firedancer validator client for Solana, is advocating for the SIMD-0370 proposal to be executed after the Alpenglow upgrade, as reported by Solana research firm Anza on Saturday. 

The Alpenglow upgrade recently passed with near-unanimous support and is scheduled for deployment on a testnet in December.

Removing fixed block limits would allow slower validators to skip more complex blocks, allowing more capable validators to take them on, as explained by Anza, a spinoff from 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 is part of wider efforts to bolster Solana’s network resilience and diversify its validator client landscape, with Firedancer expected to launch on the mainnet in September 2024 in a limited format. 

Solana has gained popularity as a retail blockchain recently, thanks to its fast, low-cost transactions and a wide array of decentralized applications. At times this year, Solana’s decentralized exchange trading volume has surpassed that of Ethereum. 

However, spikes in network activity have caused outages in the past, highlighting the need for further upgrades to maintain stability and improve the user experience.

Previous proposal aimed to increase the fixed block limit

The current fixed compute unit block limit for Solana is 60 million compute units. Without this limit, the block size would adapt based on how many transactions a validator could accommodate within a block. 

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This proposal follows a pitch made four months ago by Jito Labs CEO Lucas Bruder, who proposed raising the compute block limit to 100 million CU under SIMD-0286 in May.

Engineer voices concerns over centralization risks

While the proposal aims to motivate validators to upgrade their hardware for higher fees, it may also introduce centralization risks, as engineer Akhilesh Singhania noted 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 anticipated to be Solana’s largest protocol upgrade yet

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