Marinade pauses bond charges for Agave 4.3.2 slots
Marinade says Agave 4.3.2 nodes on Alpenglow skip about half of their first leader-window slots each epoch. Marinade will not charge bonds for those slots.
Marinade wrote on X on 27 October that Agave 4.3.2 nodes on Alpenglow skip about half of their first leader-window slots each epoch. Marinade says the fix is merged in the repository but not released yet.
Until that release, Protected Staking Rewards will not charge validator bonds for those slots. The Stake Auction Marketplace will not count them against uptime.
Marinade writes that bonds are for a validator’s own mistakes. A client bug is not one of those mistakes, Marinade says.
Neither the Agave releases, issues, and pull requests nor a search for an Anza post confirmed this skip on 27 October. The latest release without a pre-release label is still v4.3.2 from 15 October. v4.4.0-rc.1 from 26 October is marked as a pre-release.
v4.5.0-alpha.4 appeared the same day. The release note calls the build a test version. It tells operators not to deploy it to mainnet, testnet, or any production host.
Anza called v4.3.2 the recommended version for every validator in a post on 16 October.
Pull request 16258, opened by Justin Starry on 21 October, covers a different case. He writes that the first slot of a leader window sometimes loses its inflation reward because the reward certificate is missing. He puts the rate at about 2 percent of a leader’s first slots and about 0.5 percent of all slots.
The pull request was merged into master on 22 October. The backport to v4.3, number 16303, was closed the same day without being merged.
AshwinSekar writes that, after some discussion, the change will not be taken into v4.3. The backport to v4.4, number 16304, was still open on 27 October.
Pull request 16372 was open on 27 October. It builds on 16258.
What to watch
- Which change Marinade means by the fix that is already merged
- Whether Anza confirms the slot skip Marinade describes
- When a stable release after v4.3.2 ships
Sources
- Marinade — Post, 27 October 2026, 11:01 a.m. CET
- Agave — Release v4.3.2, 15 October 2026, 22:20 UTC
- Agave — Release v4.4.0-rc.1, 26 October 2026, 21:15 UTC, pre-release
- Agave — Release v4.5.0-alpha.4, 26 October 2026, 20:06 UTC, test build
- Anza — Post, 16 October 2026, 5:57 p.m. CEST
- Justin Starry — Pull request 16258, 21 October 2026, merged 22 October
- Agave — Pull request 16303, closed 22 October 2026
- Agave — Pull request 16304, open on 27 October 2026
- Agave — Pull request 16372, open on 27 October 2026