Solana Compass flags underperforming validators
Sluggish validators, consider yourselves on public watch
Artwork by Crystal Le
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I spent a decent part of today checking out Solana Compass, an independent validator and community-built scoring platform that’s been active since 2021. It ranks Solana validators based on performance, reliability and decentralization.
Some validators seem to have been deliberately slowing down their nodes in an attempt to catch more high-value transactions and increase their profit by widening their transaction intake window. If you’ve ever wondered why your swap took longer than expected or why a transaction seemed to hang for no reason, a slow validator may have caught you in its dragnet.
According to Solana Compass, one epoch last week ran nearly an hour longer than expected due to these nodes, meaning that every user had to wait longer for their transactions to land.
It’s hard to know how much is optimization vs. exploitation, but with over 33% of stake concentrated in the top 19 validators, the effects cascade quickly. The faster Solana tries to move, the more these sluggish actors slow it down.
The slowest leaders in Epoch 814 included Galaxy, Kiln1 and Kiln2, Chorus One, and several anonymous nodes. All have average block times far above the 400ms target, in some cases exceeding 800ms.
Combatting this, Solana Compass announced on Friday that it will now penalize the ranking of any validator whose block times consistently exceed 420ms. It also factors in decentralization, data center diversity, uptime, skipped votes and even whether the validator has a website or a security policy.
The project aggregates stats from Firedancer UIs across multiple geos and smooths them over five epochs (~10 days). That makes it difficult for validators to game the system with a single successful run. It also de-risks the noise from skipped slots or regional downtime.
In a time when performance differences are often razor thin, public trust is becoming the real differentiator.
Performance is a shared responsibility. With fewer rewards to go around, the spotlight shifts from raw yield to network alignment. It’s really thanks to tools like Solana Compass that our community has the knowledge to vote with their stake and the visibility to hold validators accountable.
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