Slower slot times have caused Solana’s blockchain clock clock to drift considerably and the on-chain timing has fallen half an hour behind the real world time. Although the issue is not expected to affect network operations in any way, it could lead to lower earnings from stake rewards.
Solana’s (SOL), blockchain clock is currently out of sync with real-world time by approximately 30 minutes. This is due to the longer than ideal slot times, which the project reported via the status page.
The notice was posted at 3:34 UTC and states that the issue has no impact on network performance. However, transactions on the network will show timestamps different from wall-clock time, as stated in the statement.
This is one effect of Solana’s current slower slot times. The time period within which validators can submit blocks to the network is called slot time.
Solana’s ideal slot times are 400 milliseconds (ms), but this has nearly doubled to approximately 746ms according to data taken from the Solana Blockchain Explorer Dashboard.
Solana is a proof of stake blockchain. However, the network also uses Proof-of-history as a consensus algorithm. PoH allows each network node to keep an accurate time record, which helps Solana with its timekeeping.
Solana uses clusters. These are a group of validators who are responsible for processing transactions on the blockchain. PoH allows for decentralized, cross-node timekeeping.
If slot times exceed 400ms, the clock of the cluster begins to drift. This is when it loses synchronicity to real-world time.
The slow slot time issue could have economic implications due to annualized stake rewards.
Epochs that are longer due to slower slot times will have 432,000 slots per epoch. The ideal slot time of 400ms is able to produce 182 epochs each year, with each one lasting between two and three working days. Therefore, fewer epochs are possible when slot times are slower.
Each epoch is paid with Solana’s staking reward. Delegators and validators will receive less earnings if there are fewer epochs.
This decrease in staking yield comes in addition to the fact SOL has fallen significantly, just like other coins, since the beginning of the year.
These operational issues are not new to Solana. The blockchain has experienced outages at different times. This caused the network to not process transactions for many hours at once.
