Solana's Fair Trade Proposal Hits Roadblock

A proposal to make Solana's trades fairer has stalled as block producers still get to choose which orders are included in each batch. The SIMD-0649 pull request was closed on September 25 without merging, leaving the issue for further discussion.

The proposed rule would have allowed validators to reject a block if transactions within a batch were not in fee-priority order. However, it would not have determined which transactions make the block.

Under the draft design, non-exempt transactions within each batch would need to appear in non-increasing priority order. A validator replaying the block would compare recorded priorities and treat any violations as an invalid block.

The proposal also included a minimum batch size of at least 64 data shreds to prevent leaders from making batches so small that there's almost nothing to compare. However, this does not remove all discretion for leaders, who can still close batches when it's advantageous to separate conflicting transactions.