Firedancer Pushes to Uncap Solana Blocks Post-Alpenglow

The Firedancer team at Jump suggests increasing the Solana 60M block size with Alpenglow, allowing the block size to increase with validator power and triggering validator upgrades.

The Firedancer team of Jump Crypto suggested eliminating the fixed block limit on Solana of 60 million compute units (CU) post-Alpenglow upgrade. This ambitious step is designed to make networks more scalable, since it enables the size of blocks to vary dynamically as the validator hardware capacity increases.

The governance-approved Alpenglow upgrade will improve block finalization time by an order of magnitude, down to 150 milliseconds. 

It proposes a skip-vote scheme that allows validators to vote on oversized blocks only with less powerful hardware, which increases network availability.

Firedancer’s Vision: Dynamic Block Scaling Ignites Hardware Race

Firedancer SIMD-0370 proposes the removal of the fixed cap to encourage well-resourced validators to stuff additional transactions into each block. 

Users who have the highest-quality hardware are able to earn higher charges because they will be able to process bigger blocks. With other validators upgrading to keep up, this would form a positive feedback loop, or flywheel effect, which would gradually propel the network capacity upwards.

This design encourages ongoing hardware upgrades of validators. It moves the block size control off protocol limits to real-world validator abilities. 

The team is convinced that this will open up unheard-of throughput and revenue potential of the network.

Risks and Promises Amid Network Expansion

Roger Wattenhofer, the Anza head of research and a principal contributor to Alpenglow, is a supporter of eliminating the compute limits, but has been warning of hazards. 

He cautioned against this uncapping because it will concentrate power into the hands of super-advanced validators, which will be a threat to network stability. He is not pessimistic, though, that these issues can be resolved.

The project of Jump Crypto is part of a larger effort by the Solana ecosystem to invest in growth, such as their recent partnership with Galaxy Digital and Multicoin Capital to establish Forward Industries, a Solana treasury company.

This proposal will open the door to a new era of scalability on Solana, where dynamic scaling of blocks can be used after the Alpenglow to scale to the growing demand and push the limits of the performance of validators.

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