Research @SolanaFndn PhD in Physics - Cosmology - Solana Views are my own.
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Slot time has been decreased to 200ms.
Solana is running at ~200ms since a while.
It was widely thought this was going to cause troubles, but that's not what happened.
We are few hours away from Alpenswitch, so it's useful to recap what happened 👇
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If we look at handoffs when moving leaders around the globe, we see that hot paths are rare and always involving South America and Asia.
Geo aware leader will help with this.
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This is how we are going to win.
yes, but more importantly, need to reduce perf jitter to enforce tight market tick.
basically all the cracked work Alessandro and team have been doing the last few years.
must be able to differentiate between egregious stretching vs. P99 perf outlier of honest guys
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There is one thing a lot of people in crypto don’t know about me: before joining the space I was obsessed with Bayesian analysis.
One concept in particular stuck with me: dependency on the prior.
This trained me to always ask “what happens if”.
Since then I’ve tried to measure how much my conclusions depend on prior assumptions, and to update those priors when due.
Prior updating is a very underrated concept.
I find it the only way to actually understand a topic instead of just confirming what I already believed.
Anyone should practice prior updating.
That’s what I did after reading this. I updated my prior and checked for what I wasn’t looking at (because I'm dumb and I wasn't thinking hard).
Yes: ~14% of the transactions from this informed searcher (the one using knowledge of future orderflow) buy after the trigger and close without any user transactions in between.
14%.
2/ in 86% of rounds, real users buy the same token between the bot’s buy and its sell. with no users in the window it loses ~35 mSOL. the more SOL users put in, the more it makes, up to +0.43 SOL a round. the losses don’t make it harmless, the users are the profit
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Now, how can a "trader with inside knowledge of future order flows" place orders, knowing that no one will buy subsequently?
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1/8 There are rumors of a new kind of sandwich on Solana.
However, a sandwich needs one thing: knowing your trade before it lands.
We looked at the on-chain data and found no sign of that. What we see is a momentum bet.
👇🧵
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7/8 The cherry on top: we watched the same tokens before the big buy (we don't have a predicting model, but if the searcher has, the token is the one targeted...).
Every buy of similar SOL size in the previous ~2 minutes is followed by just as many buyers within 3 slots as the bot’s picks.
The “big buy → more buys” pattern is already there. It’s public. Anyone could bet on it.
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8/8 To sum up:
• It loses ~45% of the time
• It reacts to a big buy that is already public
• It sells on a timer, while buyers keep coming
• The same pattern shows up on the token without it
The only advantage here seems the knowledge of the trigger, which the bot never frontrunned.
No sign it knows the trade flow before it lands. That’s pointing to a momentum bet, not a sandwich.
Calling something a sandwich needs evidence the bot knew the flow. Here, the data says it likely guessed.
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Umberto | Mostly Data 🧙♂️ retweeted
We still have a good amount of stake on v4.3.0. Make sure to upgrade to v4.3.2 as soon as possible. See solana.com/upgrades/alpenglo… for my info.
Added a client check to this and the results are less than ideal for activation in less than 2 days.
Validators - it's go time:
- Move to an Agave based client - preferably 4.3.2
- Fund your vote account with at least 0.8 SOL
- Make sure you set your BLS pubkey
If you need help, please reach out to us on the Solana Tech Discord.
pumpkinspool.com/watchtower/…
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