Solana’s blockchain clock
Running late
Running late is never a good thing, most events that are important require a bit of a sense of urgency. Getting to work late has always been frowned upon, “Time is of the essence” and all that.
Solana was built on speed and keeping up with time. One of the major pulls of Solana is that transactions are not only much cheaper than Ethereum transactions but a lot faster as well. Recently slower slot times have resulted in the clock of the Solana blockchain becoming 30 minutes slower than real-time.
as reported by Solana themselves the time reported by dapps and block explorers may not reflect real-time. What does this mean exactly? This means that your transactions may not reflect the real-time when you make them.
Slot times
Before we go any further it would be best to explain what “slot times” are. Slot times are time intervals that give validators permission to submit a block to the network, while the ideal time is 400 milliseconds the current slot time is now almost double that ( around 750 ms). This involves Solana’s use of a Proof Of History (POH) consensus algorithm which takes care of the time-keeping for Solana. This time-keeping is done by maintaining an accurate record of time on each node on the network by utilizing clusters which are a collection of validators. The POH is in charge of decentralized time-keeping. Anytime a transaction goes over 400 ms the time of the clock begins to veer away from real-time.
Time is money
The old adage “time is money” is a telling fact here. the time being out of sync may not be much of an issue except for when it comes to annualized staking. The time difference causes a reduction in staking yields, this coupled with the recent drastic drop in SOL creates a very unfortunate situation for those staking SOL at the moment.
Solana is still dealing with outages and issues with performance so these are not new situations with the blockchain, just more of the same. The constant issues with Solana could be an attributing factor to the drop in the price of SOL as investors are looking for projects that are a bit more stable.