Howdy!
To all of our US readers: Happy 4th of July, ‘Murica, may freedom ring, etc.
Since today’s theme is celebrating the government, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss a little about governance.
Who is Solana’s successor?
Every blockchain has a means of governance — that is, a way for humans to decide how its software should be upgraded.
Ethereum offers something very similar. Bitcoin also has core developers. Upgrades to Solana may be less well-known.
Hardhat Chad wrote to me immediately after I sent out the bat-signal for Solana developers to explain the governance of the network. “Toly proposes stuff and then Trent says no” — referring to Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and @trent.sol, the self-described “chief curmudgeon” Anza is the main client of Solana, a developer’s shop.
Trent will not say no to a proposal. Then validators use voting tokens that are based on the amount of solana staked. The client developer will then implement the new change if it passes the vote.
Yakovenko, according to multiple sources I consulted, isn’t very active in governance. However he still advises the core contributors.
Clients are implementations of blockchain software. Nicolas Schapeler, Arcium’s CTO Nicolas Schapeler informed me that Agave is Solana’s current main client.
Agave forks the original software validator created by Solana Labs. Anza maintains it. Anza’s founders are a group Solana Labs executives and core developers. Anza’s announcement was made in January. Jito offers Jito-Solana, which means that Solana now has two clients.
Validators upgrade the client to the latest version after client developers have made changes. This process is partly run by Anza. If Anza went rogue, Agave could be a major problem for Solana.
“When more clients are live, the guarantee that client devs do exactly as SIMDs say is much higher, as validators will opt to switch to a competing client if they don’t. Even though this hasn’t been a problem so far, it is a good guarantee to have in place — just in case,” Schapeler stated in an e-mail. In the event that validators disagree with an upgrade to the client, they can choose not to upgrade it or fork the source repository and remove the modification, Schapeler said.
More clients are expected to go live on Solana in the future — most notably the Jump-created Firedancer.
The strength of Solana’s governance model depends on validators’ ability to opt out of code changes they don’t like, the anonymous professionally-managed validator operator @nodedruid told me in a direct message.
“Validators watch SIMDs and code changes closely, and in the past have intervened with opinions changing the course of Anza’s (previously Labs’) validator client code,” @nodedruid said, adding: “Things will become more formalized around a ‘Solana spec’ when you have multiple teams with live clients; Firedancer, Zig, etc.”
The validators in a governance system can be thought of (for all you Netherlands fans) as the elected representatives. Solana investors can select validators to whom they will delegate their stake, with those validators having a voting power based on what they collect.
The participant who I spoke with about Solana wants this to change. “In the end state, we at Chainflow feel that validators AND delegators would vote,” Chris Remus from Chainflow explained to me his desire for more stakeholder participation in the voting process.
This would perhaps be helpful in cases where validators vote on issues that affect themselves — like the recent SIMD-0096, where validators voted to route 100% of priority fees to themselves, rather than burning half, in an effort to cut down on side deals.
“[I]f the core devs didn’t think SIMD-0096 was workable, they would have loudly advocated against it,” Austin Federa, the head of strategy at Solana Foundation, told me that “validator weighted governance has downsides, but so does token holder governance.”
— Jack Kubinec
One Good DM
Message from Rex St. John Develop relationships with developers Anza:
Did you know that over $140 billion dollars in Bitcoin, or about 20% of the entire Bitcoin supply, is currently locked in inaccessible wallets? Or maybe you have lost access to your Bitcoin wallet? Don’t let those funds remain out of reach! AI Seed Phrase Finder is here to help you regain access effortlessly. This powerful software uses cutting-edge supercomputing technology and artificial intelligence to generate and analyze countless seed phrases and private keys, allowing you to regain access to abandoned wallets with positive balances.
