Solana plans to remove block limits: throughput is expected to surge, but the risk of centralization has sparked heated debates among developers.

Solana developers are reviewing a new proposal named SIMD-0370, which plans to remove the current block limit (i.e., a cap of 60 million compute units per block) after the Alpenglow upgrade is implemented on the network. The proposal aims to significantly enhance throughput by allowing block sizes to dynamically adjust, directly linking the network's performance to the capabilities of the fastest validators' hardware. However, this change, proposed by the Firedancer development team under Jump Crypto, immediately sparked intense debate in the community about centralization risks and network security.

Proposal Core: Break Through Human Limitations, Release Hardware Performance

Currently, the capacity of the Solana network is limited by the protocol's set maximum of 60 million Compute Units (CU) per block. The Firedancer team pointed out in their proposal that this artificial limitation breaks the existing incentive structure for validators and program developers, causing the actual capacity of the network to be determined not by hardware capabilities, but by arbitrary limits on block computation units.

The core mechanism of proposal SIMD-0370 is as follows:

1. Removal of the upper limit: Completely eliminate the restriction of 60 million CU per block.

2. Dynamic Adjustment: The block size will dynamically expand to accommodate the maximum transaction volume that the fastest validators (i.e., nodes with high-performance hardware) can handle.

3. Skip-Vote mechanism: Smaller validators that cannot keep up with the processing speed of large blocks can simply skip voting on these blocks that exceed their capacity, thus maintaining network consensus.

The proposal aims to achieve natural scalability of throughput by linking Solana's capacity to the performance of validators.

Community Concerns: The Trade-off Between Scalability and Decentralization

Although the proposal promises to significantly increase network capacity, its impact on decentralization and the fairness of validators has raised strong opposition and concerns within the community:

1. Increased centralization: Some developers warn that removing the limit may favor well-funded operators. These operators can deploy high-end hardware to handle larger blocks and achieve higher returns, which may squeeze the survival space of smaller validators, thereby increasing the risk of network centralization.

2. Network Latency and Security: Additionally, community members are concerned that excessively large Blocks may lead to propagation delays, and if too many validators forfeit their votes due to processing issues, it could weaken network security and the stability of consensus.

Jump Crypto is the digital asset division of Jump Trading Group, which recently established a PIPE deal worth $1.65 billion through Forward Industries, aimed at creating a public Solana financial strategy, highlighting its far-reaching layout and significant influence within the Solana ecosystem.

Fundamental Upgrade: Alpenglow Lays the Foundation for Dynamic Blocks

The proposal to remove the block limit is built on the foundation of Solana's upcoming Alpenglow upgrade. The Alpenglow upgrade is expected to launch later this year and promises to bring several key improvements:

1. Reduce finality time: Shorten the finality time of blocks from approximately 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds.

2. Introduction of skip voting: The Alpenglow upgrade has included the skip voting feature, allowing validators with lower processing power to maintain consensus even under high load.

The Firedancer proposal utilizes the mechanisms provided by Alpenglow, such as skipping votes, in an attempt to find a balance between network capacity and decentralization—allowing network capacity to follow the strongest hardware, while ensuring the participation of slower validators and the continuous operation of the network through skipped voting.

Conclusion

The Solana community's discussion on removing block limits highlights the inherent contradiction between pursuing extreme throughput and maintaining decentralization for all high-performance blockchains. The SIMD-0370 proposal from the Firedancer team technically provides a possibility for Solana to break through bottlenecks, but its potential impact on the fairness of the validators ecosystem cannot be ignored. As the Alpenglow upgrade approaches, the community must make a difficult choice between efficiency and fairness, and the final decision will profoundly affect Solana's future direction as a high-performance public chain.

For Solana developers and investors, do you think this dynamic block size mechanism can successfully strike a balance between improving performance and ensuring decentralization?