Solana slot time upgrade cuts block speed to 350 milliseconds

Solana just shaved 50 milliseconds off the time it takes validators to produce a block, and it’s the first time the network has ever done it. The Solana slot time upgrade went live on mainnet Friday, cutting the target slot time from 400 milliseconds to 350 milliseconds and setting off what developers describe as a staged, epoch-by-epoch march toward a much faster 200-millisecond target.

Key takeaways

• Solana’s mainnet slot time dropped from 400 milliseconds to 350 milliseconds, the first such reduction since the network launched.
• The change activated as feature SIMD-0525 at slot 440,208,000 in epoch 1019, after being merged into the codebase on May 14.
• Three more 50-millisecond cuts, to 300, 250 and finally 200 milliseconds, are planned through separate feature gates, each contingent on healthy block skip rates.
• The upgrade is labeled a breaking change, and Solana says indexing adjustments for third-party tools are still being worked out.
• Jacob Creech, vice president of technology at the Solana Foundation, confirmed 300 milliseconds is the next target on the roadmap.

Solana Reduces Mainnet Slot Time for First Time

The core answer is simple: Solana just made blocks arrive faster, without changing the network’s underlying structure. This is the first slot-time reduction since Solana’s inception, and it directly shortens the window each validator gets to assemble and broadcast a block of transactions.

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