Blocknative Relay: New Feature

Node Operators
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The team at Blocknative has worked on relay improvements to help validators reduce their occurrence of orphan slots.

Orphan Slots

If the proposing validator takes too much time to submit their block to their beacon node, the next proposing validator may not receive the data in time (ie: the block doesn’t reach them fast enough). This results in a fork and an orphaned slot. More info can be seen here regarding orphan slots.

New Feature

In order to help validators reduce their instance of orphaned slots, we recently implemented a flag that synchronously publishes blocks to the beacon chain to reduce syncing issues. As soon as getPayload is requested the Blocknative Relay publishes the block to its beacon node.

What you need to know

No action is needed by Validators - this is done automatically.

4 Likes
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Ah this is great! Indeed I’ve noticed a higher incidence of orphaned blocks in the last few weeks as client teams are implementing tighter fork choice rule behavior to penalize late blocks.

I see in your note that you’ve implemented a flag to do this. Is this flag something that the relay operator configures? Could you point to the relevant documentation in case any other relay operators who may be looking into using dreamboat could learn more?