A new incentive structure that rewards validators with more credits for processing transactions quicker could speed up block confirmations on Solana.

The Solana community has approved a governance proposal to activate Timely Vote Credits (TVC) — a mechanism that will mitigate the delays in the validator voting system, and ultimately lead to lower congestion on the network and faster transaction speed.

The proposal was passed with 98.4% of voters in favour, according to data from Dune, and will be activated following weeks of comprehensive testing by the network’s developers and community discussions.

🚨 BREAKING: Proposal for Enabling the Timely Vote Credits Mechanism on @solana Mainnet:

Solana Timely Vote – 98% in favour

The proposal aims to speed up block confirmations on Solana by incentivizing quicker voting pic.twitter.com/0xsMPMv4G1

— SolanaFloor | Powered by Step Finance (@SolanaFloor) April 9, 2024

The TVC feature will fix a loophole that Solana validators have exploited in order to earn extra credits by failing to participate in consensus. Until now, validators have been maximizing their earnings by delaying voting just long enough to see which fork is the most likely to win. 

The delay in voting has led to slower confirmations and finalization of blocks on the network, which impacts the speed at which Solana processes transactions.

The TVC feature will instead award votes at a variable number of credits, with faster votes receiving more credit than slower ones. In this way, validators will be incentivized to vote quicker, making it counterproductive to wait and survey forks before voting.

The Solana network has been seeing high levels of network congestion of late, and an incident report from Coinbae’s status page shows that the delayed sends for SOL have been occurring for more than 24 hours.

Last week, Unchained reported that  75% of non-vote transactions on Solana had failed as bots dominated the network’s swap count. 

According to Fantom Foundation founder Andre Cronje, Solana is a victim of its own success, and optimizing for these bottlenecks is merely an engineering hurdle rather than a fault of consensus or any other critical components of the blockchain.

Those engineering hurdles appear to be in the process of being worked out by developers, Solana Labs founder Anatoly Yakovenko noted that shipping the patch to these congestion issues quickly would be “impossible,” but would take place as soon as the fix goes through the full release and test pipeline.