The Solana Basis is promoting “100% network uptime since March 2023” however delegators behind the Harmonic Main validator have had a completely totally different expertise.
Their node has gone delinquent 32 instances prior to now 30 days on a stake of 625,000 SOL, value over $50 million, in response to validator tracker Slashr.
Slashr places that at 12 instances the community common over that point interval.
Not like sure proof-of-stake blockchains, Solana doesn’t slash validators for going offline, so no principal is in danger. As an alternative, delinquent delegators merely miss the vote credit, inflation rewards, and MEV share they’d have earned.
The validator monitoring service estimates the chance price at roughly $413 per hour whereas the node is darkish.
Harmonic, the corporate working that validator, hasn’t publicly addressed a single incident.
How can Solana declare uptime but nonetheless have delinquencies?
A Solana validator is flagged delinquent as soon as its root slot drifts far sufficient behind the supermajority that it’s successfully stopped voting.
Penalties on delinquent validators are totally financial. Delegators forfeit the rewards they’d have earned through the downtime however delinquencies don’t burn a stake nor drive an exit from the validation system.
That distinction is the one Solana’s uptime advertising and marketing doesn’t make.
Though cluster-level uptime of the whole Solana blockchain accurately reveals 100% timeliness of the community producing blocks, the precise expertise of somebody staking SOL with a validator or staking-as-a-service supplier inside a selected cluster can differ dramatically from that headline.
Validator-level uptime measures whether or not your particular node was voting.
The 2 numbers can diverge dramatically, and in Harmonic’s case, they’ve.
By April 13, Slashr had counted 283 delinquency occasions throughout Solana through the earlier month, including as much as 1,322 hours of particular person validator downtime.
Harmonic topped that unlucky leaderboard with 32 incidents and hundreds of {dollars} in alternative price.
Anybody staking SOL with these node operators missed out on actual funds.
‘100% uptime’ versus 32 delinquencies
Though its personal homepage pitches Harmonic as a block-building system constructed to boost validator income and throughput throughout Solana akin to MEV, the Harmonic Main validator, MajorF3gAYEmUhqkoRXoL546Zim8nMa82tuUTz9LkmE, accepts delegated SOL like some other node.
Anybody who staked to it’s uncovered to the chance price of its delinquencies.
Along with non-paid validating delinquencies, Harmonic’s RPC, gossip, and TPU ports have additionally been intermittently unreachable.
Harmonic has posted freely on X throughout the identical window about function launches, open-source code releases, and hiring.
On April 9, for instance, the corporate introduced a serious improve on the identical day that Slashr flagged its ninth delinquency of the month. Harmonic hasn’t replied to any of Slashr’s tagged posts on X documenting its problematic downtimes.
Though Harmonic’s cluster saved producing blocks, its validator within that cluster missed 32 votes in a month whereas holding greater than $50 million value of SOL.
