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Solana Community Validator Call Agendas

27 Mar 2025 (Two year anniversary)

1 - Administrative

  • These community validator calls are held on the 4th Thursday of each month
  • Contact Max Sherwood if you'd like a meeting invite
  • Not recorded
  • Open to the public

2 - Intro

  • Anyone new here?
  • Well intentioned and thoughtful engagement welcome from all attendees

3 - Accelerate

  • Scale or Die (Developer-focused, applications must be approved), May 19-20 2025
    • Block Zero organizers working on a validator track
    • Topic submissions welcome
  • Ship or Die (All welcome), May 22-23 2025
  • Register here

4 - Performance discussion

  • Setting the stage, introduction to the Shinobi Performance Pool
  • Which metrics are most valuable?
    • Vote credits
    • Vote latency
    • Skip rate
  • Performance-focused validator workshop
    • Scheduling
    • Topics/direction

5 - Development team updates

  • DoubleZero development update (networking)
  • Pipe Network snapshot delivery service introduction (supporting infrastructure)
  • Firedancer development update (client)
  • Anza development update (client)

6 - Governance and SIMDs of Interest

  • Governance post-SIMD-0228
    • Where to we go from here?
    • Process improvements
      • Who votes?
        • Time to reopen this discussion?
        • Initial efforts to allow stakers to vote directly
      • Tooling
        • Visibility
        • Staker voting
  • SIMDs

7 - Validator comms

  • Emergency comms channel
  • Gated roles

27 Feb 2025

1 - Administrative

  • These community validator calls are held on the 4th Thursday of each month
  • Contact Max Sherwood if you'd like a meeting invite
  • Not recorded
  • Open to the public

2 - Intro

  • Anyone new here?
  • Well intentioned and thoughtful engagement welcome from all attendees

3 - Accelerate

  • Scale or Die (Developer-focused, applications must be approved), May 19-20 2025
    • Block Zero organizers working on a validator track
    • Topic submissions welcome
  • Ship or Die (All welcome), May 22-23 2025
  • Register here

4 - Client development team updates (TBC)

  • Firedancer development update
  • Anza development update

5 - Snapshot delivery

  • Options and ideas
  • Progress update on a tool under development (Nyet - Blockdaemon)

6 - Governance and SIMDs of Interest

7 - Validator comms

  • Emergency comms channel
  • Gated roles

23 Jan 2025

  • Thursday, 23 Jan 2025 at 19:00 UTC
    • Note time has changed from the last Community Validator call, to be consistent w/the time of the Foundation Validator calls
  • Meeting link https://meet.google.com/oxt-avji-yvz

1 - Administrative

  • These community validator calls are held on the 4th Thursday of each month
  • Contact Max Sherwood if you'd like a meeting invite
  • Not recorded
  • Open to the public

2 - Intro

  • Anyone new here?
  • Well intentioned and thoughtful engagement welcome from all attendees

3 - Firedancer development update (Philip from Firedancer)

  • Brief development update from the Firedancer team

4 - Intro from and Q&A with the DoubleZero team (Mateo and Andrew from Malbec Labs)

5 - Governance and SIMDs of Interest

  • Slashing (Continuing the discussion)
    • Overview idea
    • SIMD180 Leader schedule migration - Populates leader schedule via vote accounts rather than node id, prerequesite for SIMD-0212
    • SIMD204 - Slashable event verification - This provides an on chain mechanism to report and record violations. Currently only supports duplicate block violations, future SIMDs will add voting violations
    • SIMD212 Slashing - Implementation of slashing via burning delegations and rewards, requires governance vote
  • Inflation
    • Idea - Proposes a market-based mechanism to dynamically determine Solana emission
  • Meta/Governance
    • Idea - Proposes that a governance process is used to prioritize SIMDs

6 - Validator performance metric discussion

  • Setting the stage, intro to the Shinobi Performance Pool
  • Which metrics are most valuable?
    • Vote credits
    • Vote latency
    • Skip rate

Appendix - Other topics

  • Snapshot generation
  • Post-TVC observations

Dec 4, 2024

1 - Administrative

  • These community validator calls are held on the 4th Thursday of each month
  • Contact Max Sherwood if you'd like a meeting invite
  • Not recorded
  • Open to the public

2 - Intros

  • Anyone new here?
  • Well intentioned and thoughtful engagement welcome from all attendees

3 - Firedancer development update

  • Brief development update from the Firedancer team

4 - Introducing the DoubleZero protocol

  • doublezero.xyz
  • New project with a Foundation being led by Austin Federa
  • Mission to improve the networking stack for blockchain
  • Current status
    • 4 validators running live on a 6 node network (2 agave and 2 frankendancer)
    • Network will be expanded to 15 nodes by the end of this month
    • The network will be ready to bring on dozens more validators as well as Jito block engines in January
  • Mateo and Adam from Malbec Labs will join January community validator call for Q&A
  • In the meantime
    • Read the whitepaper
    • Reach out to them with any question

5 - Slashing

  • Slashing proposal introduction by Ashwin, Anza, presented by Tim Garcia, Solana Foundation
  • Governance slashing SIMD idea, presented by 0xIchigo from Helius

6 - Validator performance metric discussion

Appendix - Other topics

  • Snapshot generation
  • Post-TVC observations

October 24, 2024

1 - Administrative

  • These community validator calls are held on the 4th Thursday of each month
  • Contact Max Sherwood if you'd like a meeting invite
  • Not recorded
  • Open to the public

2 - Intros

  • Anyone new here?
  • Well intentioned and thoughtful engagement welcome from all attendees

3 - Introducing the Solana Hardware Compatibility List

  • Maintained by Ferric here

4 - Tracking TVC activation

  • Key: tvcF6b1TRz353zKuhBjinZkKzjmihXmBAHJdjNYw1sQ
  • Second in line for Mainnet Beta activation as listed here
  • Feature activations will resume once 95% of Mainnet Beta stake is on v2
  • Leaderboard here

5 - Firedancer development update

  • Brief development update from the Firedancer team

6 - Testnet halt post-mortem (TBC)

  • Post-mortem discussion with Will Hickey (Anza)

7 - SIMD Idea - Sharing Block Rewards and Arbitrary Lamports with Stakers

  • New SIMD idea introduction from Ben Hawkins (Solana Foundation)
  • Introduction here

8 - Snapshot hosting

  • Current resources
  • Future ideas and plans

September 26, 2024

1 - Administrative

  • These community validator calls are held on the 4th Thursday of each month
  • Contact Max Sherwood if you'd like a meeting invite
  • Not recorded
  • Open to the public

2 - Intros

  • Anyone new here?
  • Well intentioned and thoughtful engagement welcome from all attendees

3 - Block Zero Recap

  • Agenda here (Review during call)
  • 300+ people came through
  • Panel recaps
    • Decentralization (Chris / Chainflow)
    • Governance (Michael / Laine)
    • Economics (TBD)
    • Regulation (Chris, Michael)
    • Foundation Q&A (Tim)
  • Open feedback from attendees

4 - Tracking TVC activation

  • Key: tvcF6b1TRz353zKuhBjinZkKzjmihXmBAHJdjNYw1sQ
  • Second in line for Mainnet Beta activation as listed here

5 - Mods discussion

  • Types
  • Good vs. Bad
  • Responsibilities of validators running mods

July 26, 2024

1 - Administrative

  • These community validator calls are held on the 4th Thursday of each month
  • Contact Max Sherwood if you'd like a meeting invite
  • Not recorded
  • Open to the public

2 - Intros

  • Anyone new here?
  • Well intentioned and thoughtful engagement welcome from all attendees

3 - Block Zero

  • Will happen Sept 18th in Singapore
    • Shouldn't conflict with Network State this year
    • Breakpoint evening reception happens on Sept 19th
  • Register for free here
  • Sponsor list complete
  • Working agenda here (Review during call)

3 - Community Project Updates

4 - Governance next steps and feature gate activation

  • Feature gate activation
  • Governance voting and backlog prioritization
  • Next steps for governance
    • Pause and wait for releases to catch-up
    • Press forward with new voting, e.g. related to validator responsibility (censure?)

5 - Ideal validator set composition

  • Who operates them
    • Operator type
    • Operator behavior
  • Target Nakamoto Coefficient
  • Provider diversity
  • Geographic diversity

June 27, 2024

1 - Administrative

  • These community validator calls are held on the 4th Thursday of each month
  • Contact Max Sherwood if you'd like a meeting invite
  • Not recorded
  • Open to the public

2 - Intros

  • Anyone new here?
  • Well intentioned and thoughtful engagement welcome from all attendees

3 - Block Zero

  • Will happen Sept 18th in Singapore
    • Shouldn't conflict with Network State this year
    • Breakpoint evening reception happens on Sept 19th
  • Register for free here
  • Looking for (more details coming soon)
    • Talk ideas
      • Working agenda here
    • Sponsors - Slots filled

4 - MEV

  • Sandwich attacks and "bad" MEV
    • How to monitor and report
    • How to reduce/minimize
  • Private mempool participation

5 - Validator and RPC operator responsibility

  • "good" and "bad" behavior
  • Detection and reporting
  • Consequences

6 - Feature gate activation

7 - Governance

  • TVC
    • Activation status and timeline
      • key: tvcF6b1TRz353zKuhBjinZkKzjmihXmBAHJdjNYw1sQ
      • v1.18.8 on testnet
  • SIMD-0096 - Reward full priority fees to validators
    • Activation status and timeline
      • key: 3opE3EzAKnUftUDURkzMgwpNgimBAypW1mNDYH4x4Zg7
      • v2.0.0 on testnet
  • General
    • Proposal consistency, necessary or unnecessary?
    • The use of Abstain
    • Should a quorum be implemented?
    • Revisiting Who votes
  • Next steps

8 - Other topics

  • Congestion control/spam resistance updates
  • Security Council
  • Gated validator roles

May 30, 2024

1 - Administrative

  • These community validator calls are held on the 4th Thursday of each month
  • Contact Max Sherwood if you'd like a meeting invite
  • Not recorded
  • Open to the public

2 - Block Zero

  • Agreement signed and commitment made
  • Will happen Sept 18th in Singapore
    • Shouldn't conflict with Network State this year
    • Breakpoint evening reception happens on Sept 19th
  • Registration open here
  • Looking for (more details coming soon)
    • Talk ideas
    • Sponsors
      • Cost to cover: $65k ~250 people
        • Food and beverage included
        • Merch not included
      • Sponsorship range $5k-$10k
      • Sposorship target closer to $5k

3 - Community Projects

  • Marinade staking updates
  • Futarchy and MetaDAO

4 - Governance

  • TVC
    • Activation status
  • SIMD-0096
    • Results
    • Next steps
  • General
    • Proposal consistency, necessary or unnecessary?
    • The use of Abstain
    • Should a quorum be implemented?
    • Revisiting Who votes

5 - Other topics

  • Congestion control/spam resistance updates
  • Security Council
  • Gated validator roles

April 25, 2024

1 - Administrative

  • These community validator calls are held on the 4th Wednesday of each month
  • Contact Max Sherwood if you'd like a meeting invite
  • Not recorded
  • Open to the public

2 - Block Zero

  • Agreement signed and commitment made
  • Will happen Sept 18th in Singapore
    • Shouldn't conflict with Network State this year
    • Breakpoint evening reception happens on Sept 19th
  • Planning kicks into gear next week
  • Looking for (more details coming soon)
    • Talk ideas
    • Sponsors
  • Busy week in Singapore, book travel early
    • Breakpoint
    • Token 2049
    • Formula 1

3 - Governance

  • Futarchy intro
  • TVC status and next steps
  • Up next
    • SIMD 96
    • Instant restaking?

4 - Congestion control

5 - Other topics

  • Security Council
  • Gated validator roles

March 27, 2024 (One year anniverary)

1 - Administrative

  • Original plan was to hold these calls on the 4th Wednesday of each month moving forward
    • Establish consistency
    • Try to avoid overlapping weeks with Tim's call
  • Should we move the call to the 4th Thursday of each month, to establish consistency with the Foundation call schedule?
  • Will publish schedule once day is decided on
  • Contact Max Sherwood if you'd like a meeting invite

2 - Block Zero

  • Agreement signed and commitment made
  • Will happen Sept 18th in Singapore
    • Shouldn't conflict with Network State this year
    • Breakpoint evening reception happens on Sept 19th
  • Planning will kick into gear toward the end of March and no later than early April
  • Looking for (more details coming soon)
    • Talk ideas
    • Sponsors
  • Busy week in Singapore, book travel early
    • Breakpoint
    • Token 2049
    • Formula 1

3 - Firedancer updates

  • Frankendancer updates
  • Road to Firedancer updates

4 - Timely Vote Credits (TVC)

  • Current status and timeline (Dates are rough estimates)
    • Epoch 588 - 594 (3/27): Discussion period
      • Proposal here
      • Currently 12 validators have commented, 719 views
    • Epoch 595 (3/31-4/3): stake weights captured and published, discussion/confirmation of stake weights
    • Epoch 596 (4/4-4/6): voting token distribution, vote addresses created, voting begins
    • Epochs 596 - 599 (4/7-4/19): voting continues and completes
    • Epoch 600 (4/20): voting is finished and the resulting tally determines the outcome
  • Related tool intro by Zan from Shinobi
    • Before/after analysis here
    • Stake weight snapshot verification tool here

5 - SIMD 96

  • Title: Reward Collected Priority Fee In Entirety
  • Summary: Reward 100% of priority fee to validator
  • Full SIMD here
  • Current status (merged) and envisaged activation timeline?
  • Should a governance signaling vote be held?

6 - SIMD organization

  • How it's done today and who's involved
  • Suggested gaps
    • Identifying what's being worked on currently
    • Identifying what's going to be worked on next
  • Align with governance process?
  • Path forward and next steps

February 28, 2024

  • Wednesday, February 28 at 19:00 UTC
  • Meeting link here
  • Meeting notes here

1 - Administrative

  • These calls will be held on the 4th Wednesday of each month moving forward
    • Establish consistency
    • Try to avoid overlapping weeks with Tim's call
  • Contact Max Sherwood if you'd like a meeting invite

2 - Block Zero

  • Agreement signed and commitment made
  • Will happen Sept 18th in Singapore
    • Shouldn't conflict with Network State this year
    • Breakpoint evening reception happens on Sept 19th
  • Planning will kick into gear toward the end of March and no later than early April

3 - February 6, 2024 outage post-mortem

  • Timeline
    • 09:53 UTC - Halt
    • 12:34 UTC - Release binaries and restart instructions published
    • 14:55 UTC - Consensus progress resumed
  • Cause
    • tl;dr The deploy-evict-request cycle of a legacy loader program triggered an infinite recompile loop in the JIT cache.
  • Restart process
    • Satisfactory?
    • Suggested improvements

4 - Notes from the MTNDAO core developer meeting

  • Release engineering
    • Desire to center coordination on SIMD process
    • Improvements to SIMD process needed
      • Identify which SIMDs are being worked on current
      • Identify which SIMDs will be worked on, i.e. are high priority
      • Add more testing to the process
      • New TPM hired by the Foundation may be able to help here
  • Labs -> Anza transition
    • Labs and Anza clients will be released in paralled until TBD date
    • Will then transition solely to Anza client, i.e. Agave after parallel period ends
  • Firedancer
    • Team open to giving occasional updates on progress during community-led validator calls
    • Working on improving the release process
      • Making releases more visible
      • Clarifying which releases are compatible with which Labs/Anza release
  • Governance
    • Viewed as potentially useful to help coordinate client teams around release process
    • Two types
      • Internal - Among client teams
      • External - To include validators

5 - TVC proposal

  • Current status
    • Discussed at MTNDAO core developer meeting
    • General agreement in place to activate pending governance vote
  • Testing
  • Next steps
    • Draft proposal
    • Determine timeline
    • Conduct voting

January 24, 2024

1 - Administrative

  • These calls will be held on the 4th Wednesday of each month moving forward
    • Establish consistency
    • Try to avoid overlapping weeks with Tim's call
  • Contact Max Sherwood if you'd like a meeting invite

2 - Block 0

  • Planning is underway (yes, already)
  • Organized by Brian @ BlockLogic, Brian @ Jito, Chris @ Chainflow, Michael @ Laine
  • Feedback
    • What did you like from last year?
    • What could have gone better last year or what's one thing you would have changed?
    • Track/agenda suggestions

3 - Base fees and spam

  • Suggested by ZenLlama
  • Coordinated with Overclock

4 - Community projects of interest

This is a new section added last November. If there are any projects you'd like to see present in future calls, let Chris know.

  • Light Protocol (Postponed to March)

    • Shielded voting is a project Light Protocol's developing in parallel with their core product
    • What is the group's interest in shielded voting? (Can defer to governance discussion.)

  • Jito

    • StakeNet
      • Is StakeNet a viable source of stake weight information?
    • Relayer architecture

5 - Governance

November 29, 2023

  • Wednesday, November 29, 2023 1900 UTC
  • Meeting link here
  • Meeting notes here

1 - Block 0 recap

  • Brief recap for those that didn't attend
  • Feedback from those who did attend

2 - Community projects of interest

This is a new section being added this month. If there are any projects you'd like to see present in future calls, let Chris know.

These two projects relate to governance and are being presented to learn whether there might be intersections with the ongoing validator governance development process.

3 - Malicious validator behavior

  • Introduction to most recent findings by Shinobi Systems
  • Response discussion

4 - Governance

  • Recap of where we stand today
  • Discuss next steps to reinvigorate the process

October 24, 2023

  • Tuesday, October 24, 2023 1800 UTC
  • Meeting link here

1 - State of the network

  • The v1.16.18 release is now recommended for general use by MainnetBeta validators. Link
  • There are currently 212 nodes running v1.17.* on mainnet-beta. v1.17 is not currently recommended or supported for mainnet-beta. Anyone who made that upgrade unintentionally is encouraged to adopt v1.16.18. Link

2 - Block 0 planning

  • Logistics update

    • Pre-registration
    • Transportation
    • Check-in
    • Venue setup and configuration

  • Agenda update

    • Workshops
    • Roundtable discussions
    • Breakouts

3 - Governance discussion

  • Results of first vote
  • First result post-mortem
  • Next steps
  • Squads tooling presentation and discussion

4 - Decentralization - Nakamoto Coefficient drop (Did not discuss.)

  • Potential reasons for the drop
  • Potential implications
  • Steps to address
    • Near-term
    • Longer-term

Meeting Notes Summary

Meeting notes TBD.

September 11, 2023

1 - State of the network

  • Call to upgrade to v1.14.27 / v1.16.13
  • v1.16 upgrade
    • Performance improvements
    • Paused on more than 10% upgrading during ongoing troubleshooting? (currently at ~11%)
  • FTX liquidation, more activity than usual anticipated?

2 - Block 0 planning

  • Call for 2-3 additional sponsors to lighten the load on existing sponsors
    • 3 validators
    • 3 infrastructure providers
    • 1 developer
    • 1 finance
    • 1 legal
  • Working to finalize agenda, feedback window closing soon

3 - Governance discussion

  • Who, three proposals on the table
  • What, two proposals on the table
  • How, do we select among the Who and What proposals?
    • Time to start making decisions
    • Can use an interim solution
    • Realms/SPL governance discussion

Meeting Notes Summary

Meeting notes here

July 31, 2023

1 - Block 0 Planning

  • Planing doc here
  • Sponsor update
  • Attendee update
  • Agenda update and discussion

2 - Governance discussion

  • Gitbook development
    • Who maintains?
    • How to contribute?
  • Telegram discussion
  • Scope discussion, i.e. what is the governance process scope for the first implementation phase (Phase 1)?

Meeting Notes Summary

Meeting notes here

June 23, 2023

1 - Squads

  • Update on community suggestions from May 31 call

2 - Block 0 Planning

3 - Governance discussion

Meeting Notes Summary

Meeting notes here

May 31, 2023

General Theme - Validator Key Management

1 - Squads

  • Intro here
  • Validator key management capabilities here

2 - Brief re-introduction to Vote Account Manager Program (VAMP)

From the README -

This repository implements the Vote Account Manager on-chain program. It implements a controlled mechanism for managing a Solana vote account with enhanced security and support features.

3 - VAMP x Squads opportunies for collaboration/integration

Other Topics

4 - Keybase replacement PR

From the PR -

Problem

  • keybase.pub service has been sunset
  • validators need to use –force to publish a keybase username via CLI
  • Longevity of remaining keybase ecosystem is uncertain and dependence on it unnecessary

5 - Testnet outage (If interest…)

Meeting Notes Summary

Meeting notes here.

April 24, 2023

1 - Discuss root cause analysis (RCA)

  • RCA here
  • Is the RCA sufficient, are there any open questions?
  • Are there any hesitations regarding the v1.14 upgrade based on the RCA?

2 - Validator side event at Breakpoint 2023

  • Introduction - overview of general concept/idea
  • Logistics
  • Intial agenda brainstorming

3 - Introducing the slashing discussion

  • Does slashing exist on Solana

    • In protocol
    • Out of protocol

  • Is slashing needed and if so when?

    • Downtime
    • Malicious actvity/intention
    • Operator error

Meeting Notes Summary

  • On April 25th, the Solana validator community held its third community-led call, as announced in the Solana discord server. The majority of discussion happened around the topic of slashing on Solana, and whether slashing and/or downtime penalties should be introduced. Chris Remus from Chainflow proposed an agenda and moderated the discussion. Max Sherwood from H2O Nodes took notes. Tim Garcia from the Solana Foundation was also present and contributed to the discussion.

  • Some participants argued that slashing is needed on Solana, pointing out that slashable offenses have been committed in the past, but have gone unpunished. It is difficult to differentiate between mistakes and malicious behavior that is masquerading as a mistake.

  • There was discussion around whether slashing should reduce only rewards, or also the principle stake amount. It was pointed out that reducing the principle staked amount reduces a bad actor’s ability to continue malicious behavior.

  • Fundamentally, slashing should solve the “nothing at stake” problem, to stop validators from voting on multiple forks. Examples of slashable offenses could include: lockout violation, producing duplicate blocks, failing to produce blocks, or failure to forward transactions.

  • Quadratic slashing mechanisms are complicated, but could ensure that slashed validators don't lose all their money…
    There was some reluctance to punish delegators, but it was pointed out that this is necessary in order to encourage delegators to more thoughtfully choose validators to stake with, and hold validators accountable.

  • It was pointed out that slashing could lead to increased decentralization of stake, (delegators spreading out of stake to multiple validators to reduce risk) or conversely slashing could increased centralization of stake. (Delegators choose to stake with large/centralized providers who are considered “safe”.)

  • In either case, it will be necessary to educate delegators far in advance around the slashing mechanism, explaining that this will protect and strengthen the network going forward.

  • The implementation of slashing and specifics around penalties should be discussed via a SIMD and subject to a governance vote.
    An SIMD currently exists on how to track data on-chain in order to build slashing: https://github.com/solana-foundation/solana-improvement-documents/pull/9

Full meeting notes by Max @ H20 Nodes here.

March 21, 2023

1 - Follow-up on outage post-mortem to-do's

  • Review progress
  • Gauge interest to continue and discuss next steps
  • Use of these calls moving forward

Note: Expected to spend majority of time here.

2 - Discuss comms channels, what to discuss where?

  • Main Solana server
  • Solana community server
  • Forum

Note: Pulls in discussion topic #4 from here.

3 - DDoS Mitigation or Minimum Commission discussion (time permitting)

  • Topics taken from here

Appendix

Meeting Notes

Meeting notes here.

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cfl0ws / chainflow
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