Authored by Gurnoor Narula (Placeholder) and Mustafa Qazi (Volt Capital)

The process of updating Solana has waterfall effects on Solana’s incentive design, validator economics, and therefore, validator set equity. Certain proposals, such as Alpenglow, are inevitable upgrades given their performance, engineering, and user experience benefits. Under the assumption of these proposals and their economic side effects, we found that a modified version of SIMD-228 and a lower VAT fee of 0.135 SOL/day would be optimal for validator decentralization, pending a more formal discussion of Alpenglow’s reward schemes. 

One of the key advantages of blockchain networks over other digital platforms is that data about assets and transactions hosted on a blockchain is publicly available. This allows for close to real-time tracking of how different networks compare across a variety of metrics. The most reliable method for assessing the usage of a particular blockchain is to zoom in on individual measures, ideally at the level of specific applications or user groups. However, that’s not always feasible. As the number of networks and the amount of data grows, various forms of aggregation are required to simplify the tracking process without losing the ability to identify when and where a closer look at the underlying data is warranted. This post provides an overview of one such attempt at metrics aggregation.