Solana upgrades software as validators see fortunes shift

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Two months ago, I reported on some of the woes facing Solana’s smaller validators, which are computer nodes that verify Solana’s ledger is accurate. Solana’s fees and tips were in decline amid apparent fatigue from memecoin traders. In response, the Solana Foundation — the non-profit charged with supporting Solana — set a cap on the commissions that validators could charge while receiving a staking delegation from the foundation, which is a necessity for some small validators.

Most crucially, the price of SOL was languishing, limiting upside for validators’ biggest potential source of revenue. Some estimated that validators would need to attract millions of dollars more in SOL than before to break even.

Today, that all appears to have shifted. SOL’s price crossed the $200 mark for just the third time since 2021, and daily validator revenue has been in excess of $30 million every day since mid-October, according to data from 21.co. In early September, revenue was around $22 million per day.

Anza, which is the developer shop spun out of Solana Labs, just released v2.0.14 of Solana’s software, one of its first upgrades since it implemented a central scheduler over the summer.

So far, only around 40% of validators have made the switch from v1 to v2. The upgrade makes minor tweaks to the Solana protocol, but validators who made the switch have anecdotally reported better performance.

One validator said the new client version has better maximal extractible value (MEV) rewards than the old one. Another said their votes — or transactions made to validate the blockchain ledger is accurate — have been going through quicker since the upgrade.

Knoxtrades, the anonymous owner of the Juicy Stake validator, told me that they have noticed Solana’s central scheduler “works in conjunction” with stake-weighted quality of service (SWQoS), a feature that lets larger validators land transactions more effectively. This has caused a “noticeable change in block rewards” because Solana blocks are packing in transactions more efficiently, knoxtrades said in a text.

But what could be most important to look for is how many validators plug their computers back in. A year ago, the Solana network had around 1,970 nodes, according to Solana Compass. Today, that figure is 1,358, indicating a less distributed set.

Still, some validators have chosen to get back in the game during Solana’s recent metrics and price rally: The network has added 58 new nodes since Sept. 28.

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