Solana's Fair Trade Plan Hits Roadblock Amid Block Producer Control

Solana's proposal for fairer trades has stalled as block producers continue to control which orders get into blocks. A draft rule, known as SIMD-0649, aimed to allow validators to reject a block if transactions within an entry batch were recorded out of fee-priority order.

The proposed consensus check would make the order of transactions within each completed batch inspectable and enforceable, but it would not establish one priority queue for an entire slot. The rule would give observers a testable answer to whether the recorded order was consistent with the proposed score.

However, the draft's non-goals leave leaders free to select transactions, defer them to later batches, and choose batch boundaries. A high-priority transaction in a later batch would not be moved ahead of a lower-priority one in an earlier batch simply because its score is higher.