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Solana(SOL) cut its mainnet slot time to 350 milliseconds on Friday, the first such reduction since the network’s launch.
Key Points:
- Solana’s mainnet target slot time fell from 400 milliseconds to 350 milliseconds, taking effect at epoch 1020.
- The change is the first of four planned 50-millisecond steps toward a 200-millisecond target.
- Per-slot compute limits shrink in proportion, holding the theoretical ceiling near 250 million units per second.
Solana Slot Time Drops To 350 Milliseconds
Jacob Creech, vice president of technology at the Solana Foundation, marked the change in a post on X. “We’re in a new era of 350ms,” he said, pointing to 300 milliseconds as the next stop. A Foundation tracker put average slot times at 360 milliseconds soon afterward, down from the 400-millisecond figure written into the protocol at genesis.
The feature account activated at slot 440,208,000, the first slot of epoch 1019, but a one-epoch delay held the network at its previous 400-millisecond target until epoch 1020 opened.
Anza, the research firm that maintains the Agave validator client, shipped the step as part of its Agave v4.2 release, which carries several other protocol changes.
Anza And Helius Executives Weigh Throughput Gains
The governing proposal, SIMD-0525, specifies three further 50-millisecond reductions before the network reaches its 200-millisecond target. Each stage carries a separate feature gate. The document also trims per-slot work limits at every step, so validators are never asked to process more compute in a given second than they handle today.
Brennan Watt, chief executive of Anza, confirmed that testnet slot times had already reached 182 milliseconds, with explorer data showing a 193-millisecond average over the preceding hour. Reductions there have landed roughly every two epochs.
Mert Mumtaz, chief executive of Helius, told a podcast that shorter slots paired with a higher block limit would quadruple network throughput in the near term. Maximum block compute drops to 87.5 million units at 350 milliseconds, down from the 100 million ceiling mainnet adopted in July. The theoretical maximum stays near 250 million units per second.
Solana Validators Face Tighter Timing Margins
Leaders still hold four consecutive slots, so their window narrows to 1.4 seconds from 1.6 seconds, tightening handoff and propagation margins across a validator set already stretched by faster block production.
Off-chain software poses a separate hurdle, because some client constants, explorers and indexers still treat the 400-millisecond slot as a fixed number rather than a value read from the cluster.
The Foundation published the staged plan in June, gating each of the four steps separately so that operators could pause the sequence if block skip rates climbed above levels validators had agreed to tolerate. Testnet took the first 350-millisecond step on Aug. 5. It now runs at an effective 200-millisecond target, while devnet sits at 300 milliseconds with its 250-millisecond gate switched on but not yet in force.
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Source: yellow.com