Summary
The Solana validator network continues to grow and thrive, as measured by metrics including node count, Nakamoto Coefficient, and node distribution and diversity. Notably, since the last validator health report:
There has been rapid progress in Solana’s evolution as a multi-client network, with over 31% of stake running through the Jito Labs client: This is up from 0% just over one year ago. Additionally, two more validator clients are in development.
The network has experienced 100% uptime: Multiple new practices in software upgrade procedures have been implemented since a February 2023 performance degradation. Since February 26, 2023, the network has experienced 100% uptime.
As of Sept. 6, 2023, Solana continues to be one of the largest proof of stake networks in the world by node count, and one of the most distributed, as measured by Nakamoto Coefficient and now, validator software clients.
The Solana Foundation has also seen a noticeable uptick in the engagement of the validator network in recent months. These are hard metrics to put a number to, but some indicators of validator community engagement include:
Regular community led validator calls: In March 2023, the validator ecosystem began planning and convening consistent calls for the validator community to share notes and best practices.
Block 0, a conference for Solana validators: The validator community is hosting the first ever Block 0 in Amsterdam on Oct. 30, 2023. This is an entirely community-run event to discuss the evolution of the Solana network and reinforce social ties.
Solana mainnet beta launched in March 2020, three and a half years ago. In that time, the ecosystem has matured substantially. The Solana Foundation strives to be rigorous and intellectually honest as we assess the network’s health and opportunities to make it even more resilient, and we encourage the community to share their thoughts here.
Core Client Development
In the previous Validator Health Report, the Foundation discussed changes in thinking about the best way to measure and evaluate the health of the network. In particular, the Foundation has spent significant effort recently reinforcing the validator network’s health at the software level. In this vein, the Foundation has focused on encouraging the development of new software clients and reinforcing a network of core contributing developers from multiple organizations.
Validators are computers that run a Solana validator client, which is the operating system of the Solana network. It’s important for the resiliency and decentralization of any blockchain network to have more than one software client; this helps ensure that there’s no single failure point in the network’s software. One of the biggest victories for the ecosystem is Solana becoming a multi-client network, which means validators have a choice of clients to run.
How Solana is doing:
There are four different validator client implementations for the Solana network in active development, built on three independent codebases. Notably, the Jito Labs client is run by over 31% of Solana validators, up from 16% since March 2023 (the previous Validator Health Report) and up from 0% since August 2022, when the client first launched to mainnet. 9
Validator client diversity is important for the long term health and functioning of the network. With multiple validator clients, the risk of one bug or harmful piece of code in a single client is mitigated by the existence of other independent clients, which are unlikely to have the same bug or malware attack, making a total network outage less likely.
The first validator client on Solana was originally developed by Solana Labs. Since then, there’s been several independent efforts to create additional full or light validator clients on the Solana network:
Jito Labs: In August 2022, Jito Labs released a second validator client to mainnet. This is a fork of Solana Labs code that Jito is independently building and is responsible for maintaining, changing, and deploying. However, because this is a fork of the existing client, a bug in the Solana Labs client would likely be present in this client.
Firedancer: Also in August 2022, Jump Crypto announced plans to build a completely new validator client on Solana. This validator client is being developed from the ground up in C++ and has shown significant performance improvements. In testing environments, Firedancer has processed up to one million transactions per second (in comparison, the original Solana Labs client processes closer to 55,000 transactions per second in similar testing environments.).
Sig: In July 2023, Syndica announced the development of Sig, a validator client for the Solana network written in the Zig programming language. In September 2023, the validator team at Syndica unveiled the initial implementation of the gossip protocol for Sig.
TinyDancer: In addition to these four validator clients, TinyDancer, a light client for Solana, is in active development. Light clients like TinyDancer do not build blocks and participate in consensus, but instead make it easier for users to verify the state of a blockchain without having to run a full node themselves.
Total Validator Count
Blockchains with more validators tend to be more resilient. When a user executes a contract on a blockchain, they need to be confident that their transmission will be recorded. Ideally, each addition to a blockchain is recorded on every validator on that chain, which is why a higher number of validators is important; a large number of diverse validators protects against catastrophic events like a data center outage.
There are two types of validators:
Consensus nodes: Consensus nodes are central to the functioning of the network by providing two essential functions: (1) creating and proposing new blocks to the rest of the network and (2) voting on the validity of new blocks proposed by other nodes on the network.
RPC nodes: Remote Procedure Call (RPC) nodes are an application’s gateway to the Solana infrastructure. These nodes, like consensus nodes, independently verify all new blocks and changes to the network. However, they do not vote.
See the appendix for more details on total validator count and why it’s important.