Solana co-founder calls for penalties against validators who intentionally delay block slots, steal rewards, and slow down the network.

Golden Finance reported that Solana co-founder Anatoly “Toly” Yakovenko called for punishment against those validators who delay the gaps, steal rewards, and cause the network to slow down. Yacowen's call for punishment is due to his frustration with validators using complex delay strategies to obtain extra fees and high-value transactions. The deliberately delayed slot time has become so bothersome that one validator created a dashboard to showcase the issue. Since August 5th — Solana epoch 829, the average slot time has increased by 2.5%. Some have complained, “What should be rising is the price of SOL, not the block time.” One observer asked whether these delays would trigger a situation similar to the “Intentional Leader Reward Boost (ILRB)” 2.0 version. ILRB is a timing strategy that some validators would use when they want to deliberately delay block production. Extending the slot time to over the expected 400 milliseconds from Solana would deliberately delay the delay time and allow them to unfairly pack more transactions into their own blocks, thus obtaining higher fees or rewards. Yacovencai suggested to “default discard these blocks for 10 time slots” as a penalty for those slow but influential validators. He also repeatedly called for economic penalties for misbehaving validators. Currently, the Solana developer store Anza has proposed a series of measures to consider implementing a reduction mechanism in the network, which involves penalizing validators by deducting their stake, but this also poses risks for SOL stakers.