fikunmi (@fikunmi_ap) “Now that Solana has abandoned the expedition into geographically distributed MCP” — TopicDigg

Now that Solana has abandoned the expedition into geographically distributed MCP, it's high time we revisited Solana's broader approach to geographic distribution. Geographically distributed MCP was always weak at best. Even if you ignored the insane latency involved in going from transaction submission to assembled blocks and execution results, it was not a good CR mechanism. MCP's CR guarantees depend heavily on users' ability to send transactions to at least two proposers, and this imposes a trade-off between slot duration and geographic decentralization. If the ratio is not managed, there will be instances where your transaction cannot make it to more than one leader within the slot time. Sending it to a leader you trust defeats the purpose of MCP; it has the same bound on geographic decentralization and it's unclear whether all the extra complexity is justified by this weaker guarantee compared to the status quo. Constellation's leader colocation fixes that completely. Users can now send to all the leaders with ~the same latency, and the Nash equilibrium is to include the top fee-paying transactions. However, I think the current Constellation is not aggressive enough. Solana is rechoosing its spot on the physical distribution spectrum, and current Constellation leaves some chips on the table. In the coming days, I'll write up a design I've been working on that I think maximizes what's possible. I'm talking fully onchain orderbooks that are competitive with centralized systems. All said, the most important takeaway from Roger's talk and the entirety of today is that Solana's people and culture are its greatest assets. There is a pragmatism and relentless dedication to winning that I haven't seen anywhere else!