Ethereum rival gets validator in South Africa

Superfast founder Martin Tromp has launched a validator for Solana in one of Teraco’s Johannesburg data centres.

Solana is a fast, scalable, and low-cost blockchain platform positioned as a competitor to Ethereum and other smart contract platforms in decentralised finance and Web3.

As a proof-of-stake system, Solana validators are integral to the network’s operation, helping to maintain security and verify transactions.

Validators earn rewards in exchange for their work and provide opportunities for delegators to participate in staking, contributing to the network’s overall security and decentralisation.

Anyone who owns Solana’s native token, SOL, can delegate their funds to a validator for staking.

SOL is also used to pay transaction fees on the network, a portion of which is paid to stakers via their chosen validators.

Tromp explained that he initially launched the validator at an Africa Data Centres facility in Cape Town to minimise the latency between his server and the node clusters in the US and Europe.

Latency is important because Solana has a 400-millisecond block time. This refers to the time it takes for a new block to be added to the blockchain.

Solana’s fast block time is one of its distinguishing features, making it one of the fastest blockchain platforms available.

For comparison, Ethereum has block times of 12–14 seconds, while Bitcoin targets a 10-minute block time.

Validators take turns verifying the next block of transactions and earn rewards when they do. The higher the latency to the rest of the network, the less time you might have to produce a block.

When four submarine cable systems on Africa’s West coast suffered breaks at the same time on 14 March 2024, it impacted Tromp’s validator.

“After the cable breaks, I couldn’t get performance up to scratch and moved out of Africa Data Centres into Teraco JHB,” he said.

Tromp said performance was better in Teraco even though its Joburg facility was 20ms further from the coast.

However, he noted that he also upgraded to better hardware while migrating to Teraco — from servers with AMD Epyc 7443 processors to AMD Epyc 9245 CPUs.

“Potentially, my kit in Africa Data Centres just wasn’t good enough anymore. This happens as all validators improve their hardware, and the old ‘potato’ nodes will perform worse,” said Tromp.

“Right now, I am doing some non-scientific tests on whether there is any loss in revenue by being 160ms away from the nearest central hub (EU) within Solana’s 400ms block times,” he said.

“So far, it doesn’t seem to be the case due to the nature of transaction forwarding on the network.”

Regarding staking on Solana, Tromp said it is easy and built-in with a self-custody wallet such as Phantom or Solflare.

“You can choose to stake natively, which gives you base inflation rewards currently around 7% per annum. Depending on which validator you choose, you’ll get another 0.35% for Jito MEV.”

Jito MEV refers to software validators can use to increase their rewards, with MEV short for maximum extractable value.

“Depending on block speeds, we’ve seen the base yield go up to 8%. With more MEV activity, tips can go up to 1.5%,” Tromp said.

He also explained that more advanced users may consider liquid staking options.

Usually, staked SOL is locked until the user unstakes it. It can take up to two days for stakes to “warm up” or “cool off”.

Liquid staking allows you to exchange SOL for another token issued by a smart contract that then stakes the SOL in the background.

This token represents staked SOL and can be traded or used in other smart contracts that support liquid staking tokens.

However, this carries some security risks. For instance, if the liquid staking smart contract has bugs, your SOL tokens could be stolen.

For this reason, it should only be considered by advanced users who have carefully considered the risks involved.