According to PANews, Solana validators have approved a proposal aimed at reducing the delay in consensus voting, which could potentially speed up transaction speeds on the blockchain. The proposal, which calls for the implementation of a 'timely voting points' mechanism on Solana, was passed on April 9th with 98% approval. It will change the way validators are incentivized to vote - voting is a key part of Solana's transaction confirmation consensus mechanism.
So far, according to Solana Labs, whenever a validator submits a consensus vote on a final block on the network, they receive a fixed voting point. Over time, validators have found that they can maximize their returns by delaying their votes to ensure they are cast on the correct fork, without incurring any penalties. This proposal, put forward by Solana validator Shinobi Systems' 'zantetsu' on March 14th, will implement a variable number of voting points, awarding more points to votes that are delayed less. Solana Labs explained, 'This will prevent intentional 'lagging', as delayed voting will reduce the points received from voting.'
The impact of the new mechanism is not yet known, as it is expected to be implemented sometime after this month's Solana v1.18 upgrade, which includes patches to fix on-chain priority fees and network congestion issues. If no other issues arise during testing, the bug fix (involving the reconfiguration of QUIC) is now scheduled for April 15th.