Researchers studying Solana’s SIMD-0675 found that ordering validator leaders by geographic proximity could reduce handover delay by around 29 milliseconds in one highlighted configuration. The work is research, not evidence that the schedule has been activated on mainnet. It would change the order of production slots, not how many slots each validator receives.
The analysis used 6,250 synthetic networks based on 124 existing validator locations. The researchers warned that grouping nearby leaders could keep the schedule concentrated in one region for longer and give validators an incentive to misreport their declared locations.
