Zero-cost votes

Significantly lower the barrier to validate X1 blockchain

Vote costs on Solana present significant challenges to decentralization. At todays price of 250 USD/SOL, validators must pay approximately $8,600/month to participate in consensus, with 94% of this cost coming from voting fees. These fees create a high barrier to entry, discouraging smaller validators while disproportionately benefiting larger ones. Validators bear these costs to support the network, while top leaders profit from vote fees and block rewards, exacerbating centralization.

Arguments for vote fees include covering compute resources (2,100 CUs per vote) and deterring spam. However, these justifications are flawed. Votes are net-positive for the network, enhancing resilience and security. Taxing them discourages participation, ultimately weakening the system. As for spam, weighted votes require stake to count, making spam voting ineffective. Malicious actors could already spam at low cost, and true consensus attacks would still require 33% of the total stake, an unattainable threshold for most.

On the X1 testnet (Xolana), a cluster of 89 nodes has demonstrated that removing vote costs is not only possible but also beneficial. Without these fees, validator costs drop significantly, enabling higher scalability and profitability. This approach lowers barriers to entry, encouraging more validators to join and strengthening decentralization. Removing vote costs aligns with the principle that anything above zero is a tax on network participants, in this case, validators.

Concerns about full blocks pushing out votes, seen during solXEN PoW on Solana, are also addressed. X1 implements congestion-reflective dynamic base fees, ensuring blocks are never full and eliminating the risk of votes being displaced. Even in rare cases where votes are delayed, the network remains secure, with consensus only postponed by one block.

This approach is a major differentiator from Solana. By removing vote costs, X1 reduces operational expenses, improves validator incentives, and creates a more decentralized and inclusive blockchain. This system is close to being fully implemented and will be ready before the launch of X1.

By reducing the validator operational costs, thus achieving a 40x increase in cost efficiency, the aggregate cost to run the whole network is also lower.