Jump's Firedancer team proposes uncapping Solana blocks after Alpenglow upgrade

Jump Crypto's Firedancer team, which is working on building a high-performance client for Solana, proposed that the network lift its per-block compute unit (CU) block limits following the Alpenglow upgrade slated to begin testing later this year. 

The team's SIMD-0370 proposal calls for Solana to remove its block limit, currently set at a fixed value of 60 million CU, though a proposal published earlier this year could see the limit increase to 100 million. Without a fixed limit, the block size would scale based on how many transactions a high-performance validator could fit into a block. Validators running less powerful hardware would automatically abstain from voting on oversized blocks, using the skip-vote mechanism planned for the Alpenglow upgrade. 

The proposal argues that, by removing the block limit cap and given sufficient network demand, well-capitalized block producers will improve their hardware, allowing them to put more transactions into a single block and earn more revenue. Other block producers are then incentivized to improve their hardware, to avoid automatically abstaining from the oversized blocks. 

The incentives "produce a flywheel effect where block producers continually improve their performance, which in turn increases the average capacity of the validator client set, which in turn makes it possible for block producers to safely push the limits, and so on," the proposal states. 

Roger Wattenhofer, head of research at Solana development firm Anza which spearheaded Alpenglow, called himself "a big fan of the idea of removing the compute limit completely" but flagged some concerns over the proposal, saying it could lead to centralization and that a super-advanced block producer could risk network stability. 

"I think all these problems are solvable, so I've always been a big advocate of ditching the limit," Wattenhofer wrote.

Alpenglow, the name given to Solana's next major upgrade, cleared governance with near-unanimous support following a vote earlier this month. The major overhaul of Solana's consensus system will reduce block finality from 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds, along with other upgrades to network resilience and data optimization. 

Jump Crypto, aside from its work on Firedancer, joined with Galaxy Digital and Multicoin Capital to start a Solana treasury firm, Forward Industries, Inc., earlier this month. The three firms led a $1.65 billion private investment in the firm, in cash and stablecoin commitments, with Jump Crypto CIO Saurabh Sharma joining the board as an observer.