As written earlier, Shadow Drive is capable of ingesting the most recent block, storing it, replicating it, and then serving RPC requests against it faster than the Solana validators can build the next block. This new capacity allows us to maximize our relationship with Solana Labs by being able to answer RPC requests using machines which are not affected by any turbulence of the Solana validator network. The current design of the RPC server is also deeply tied to the state of congestion on Solana at any given moment. What we have done with Shadow Nodes has allowed us to keep them deeply tied to Solana as an RPC node, however we’ve attached the tie in a different way and place to allow Shadow Nodes to truly maximize stability and performance.