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I spent a decent part of today and checked out Solana Compass, an independent validator and community-built scoring platform that has been active since 2021. Ranked under Solana Balidators based on performance, reliability and decentralization.
It appears that some validators are intentionally slowing down nodes in order to catch more valuable transactions and increase profits by expanding the transaction intake window. If you’ve ever wondered if the swap took longer than expected, or why the transaction appears to be drooping for no reason, then a slow-patterned ballster might have caught you in that dragon stomp.
According to Solana Compass, one epoch last week ran for nearly an hour more than expected for these nodes. This means that all users had to wait a long time for the transaction to land.
It’s difficult to know how much optimization and exploitation is, but the effects are quickly cascaded as more than 33% of stocks are concentrated on top 19 validators. The faster Solana tries to move, the slower these slower actors.
The slowest leaders on the Epoch 814 included Galaxy, Kiln1, Kiln2, Chorus One, and several anonymous nodes. Everything has average block time well above the 400ms target, and in some cases over 800ms.
Fighting this, Solana Compass announced on Friday that it will punish variator rankings with block times of over 420ms. It also takes into account decentralization, data center diversity, uptime, skip voting, and even whether the variator has a website or security policy.
