Solana’s (SOL) blockchain clock is at present adrift of real-world time by about half-hour because of longer than ideally suited slot occasions on the community, the challenge reported by way of its standing web page on Thursday.
In line with the discover posted at 3:34 UTC, the problem doesn’t have any impression on community efficiency. Transactions on the community will, nonetheless, present timestamps which are completely different from “wall-clock time,” because the assertion put it.
This time disparity is without doubt one of the results of the present slower slot occasions on Solana. Slot time refers back to the time interval inside which a validator can submit a block to the community.
Solana’s ideally suited slot time is 400 milliseconds (ms) however this worth has virtually doubled to about 746ms, in line with knowledge from the Solana blockchain explorer dashboard.
Whereas Solana is a proof-of-stake blockchain, the community additionally makes use of proof-of-history (PoH) as a consensus algorithm. PoH takes care of Solana’s timekeeping by enabling every node on the community to take care of an correct file of time.
Solana makes use of clusters, a group of validators which are accountable for processing transactions on its blockchain. PoH permits for decentralized timekeeping throughout all of the nodes in a cluster.
When slot occasions change into considerably longer than 400ms, the cluster’s clock begins to float, that’s to say, it loses synchronicity with real-world time.
Other than on-chain timekeeping being out of sync with real-world time, the gradual slot time subject might even have some financial penalties associated to annualized staking rewards.
When slot occasions are slower, epochs change into longer since there have to be 432,000 slots in each epoch. On the ideally suited 400ms slot time, there are 182 epochs per 12 months with every epoch lasting between two and three days. Slower slot occasions, due to this fact, imply fewer epochs.
Solana’s staking rewards are paid on every epoch. As such, fewer epochs will imply a discount within the earnings collected by delegators and validators on the community.
This discount in staking yield can be along with the truth that SOL, like different cash, has declined considerably for the reason that begin of the 12 months.
Solana isn’t any stranger to those operational and efficiency points. The community has suffered outages on completely different events with the blockchain not processing transactions for a number of hours at a time.
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