Last year, @buffalu__ authored SIMD-0286, which proposed raising the block limit to 100m CUs. Today, it was finally merged—a major step in increasing bandwidth for Solana. Block space on Solana is a finite resource that block producers have to carefully budget when packing transactions into a block. Raising the block limit to 100m CUs increases the amount of block space available in each block, resulting in higher TPS and higher rewards per block. As the largest block producer on Solana, we are excited about the impact of SIMD-0286 and optimizing Jito's block building infrastructure to maximize the value in every block. Accelerate.

Optimizing Exchange Latency At HFTs I built low-latency trading systems for traditional and cloud-native exchanges including Nasdaq, NYSE Arca, CME, ICE, SGX, JPX, Coinbase/GDAX, and others. A summary/discussion of the current split in low-latency network infrastructure Colocation: Traditional exchanges are hosted in physical datacenters. Colocation involves renting rack space with cross-connects to the exchange matching engine. While it is expensive and time-consuming to set up, physical colocation guarantees an equalized path to the exchange. By contrast, it is fast and inexpensive to set up cloud servers but difficult to guarantee the lowest latency. To be colocated with an exchange running in AWS, firms first need to understand not only what region the exchange is deployed in (e.g. us-east-1) but also the availability zone (e.g. use1-az4). Even within a single availability zone, there is variance in how close a randomly placed EC2 instance lands to the matching engine. Non-determinism: Networking setups for traditional exchanges offer deterministic access to matching engines by running the same cable lengths to all client boxes. Public clouds have a significant degree of non-determinism due to routing within a cloud region. Two different EC2 instances in us-east-1/use1-az4 could have different latencies to the same matching engine in the same zone. Firms mitigate this issue by spinning up multiple instances and choosing the one with lowest ping times, as well as using cluster placement groups and AWS technology such as ENA Express. Unicast instead of multicast: Traditional exchanges disseminate market data over UDP multicast, which puts a single copy of the book on the wire and delivers it to every participant simultaneously. Public clouds don't offer multicast in any form usable for market data: VPCs have no native support, and Transit Gateway multicast is built for enterprise applications rather than microsecond-sensitive feeds. Cloud-native exchanges therefore publish over TCP unicast, which involves a separate copy for every subscriber and a fan-out order that no longer treats them equally. HFTs recover what they can by bypassing the kernel for their networking stack. They use a poll-mode driver such as DPDK over ENA that lets the NIC DMA frames directly into userspace ring buffers, with a userspace TCP stack handling the protocol above it. Inter-region latency: Expensive microwave, millimeter-wave, and subsea fiber links carry the lowest-latency paths between physical datacenters, and none of them terminate inside a cloud region. To move data between cloud regions and traditional venues, firms combine the long-haul routes of established market data vendors with specialized cloud on- and off-ramps, paying a penalty at each transition. Since price discovery still originates largely from traditionally colocated exchanges, trading on public cloud venues adds to a firm's market data infrastructure footprint rather than replacing it. Partnerships between CME and Google and between Nasdaq and Amazon aim to deliver infrastructure that combines the flexibility and global reach of public clouds with the deterministic latency of purpose-built exchange datacenters. If that convergence arrives, most of the practices above stop paying. The advantage in trading on cloud-native exchanges may shift back toward the firms with decades of colocated experience rather than those who have built expertise in cloud-latency engineering.

STOP IMPROVING PERFORMANCE!! many ppl have seriously told me this. “artificial scarcity will increase fees” we’re not listening. Solana is not here to make blockspace expensive. we’re here to eat finance

.@world_xyz is a fully onchain prediction market native to Solana. 🌎 It’s non-custodial, so funds stay in your wallet until the moment you enter a market. When an event resolves, settlement is automatic and winnings land instantly. No claims process, no one in the middle. Prediction markets belong onchain.

I've been loudly pushing back on the corp-chain FUD that MEV makes permissionless networks un-useable for traditional fin'l tx's. My article in @traders_tweets today lays out the full rebuttal. Open networks have won out every time; they'll win again now.

I recently came across discussions about the negative impact of arbitragers/searchers using private orderflows on @solana. The main argument: it's not fair. Do you see the purple curve in the screenshot? That's the percentage of transactions related to arbitrage in a block. 3 months ago: 30% on average. Currently: 15% on average. Now, if we look at the revenue attributed to private orderflows: 3 months ago: 15-20% on average. Currently: 35-40% on average. The majority of this percentage is associated with spam/crank transactions that are of little value to the chain and take up a huge amount of space/CU in the blocks. Is this new arbitrage approach really bad for Solana or does it protect the chain from spam while making the market even more stable than ever for traders? 🤔