Solana is due to shorten its target slot time from 250 to 200 milliseconds at the start of epoch 1053, which Anza expects around 15:00 UTC on Friday, 9 Oct. Anza is the company that builds Agave, a widely used Solana validator program.
A slot is Solana’s so-called unit of block production, a short window in which one chosen validator may add a block of transactions. Validators are the computers that confirm transactions on the network.
At 200 milliseconds Solana would target five slots per second, against 2.5 under the original 400-millisecond setting. As of this writing the change had not yet activated, and the timing is Anza’s estimate, so we will update this article once it has.
The cut is the last of four steps in a proposal known as SIMD-0525, according to Solana’s upgrade page. The network moved to 350 milliseconds on 21 Aug, to 300 milliseconds on 28 Aug and to 250 milliseconds on 18 Sep.
Each step was switched on by a “feature gate”, and takes effect one epoch later. An epoch is a fixed number of slots, so shorter slots also make each epoch shorter in clock time.
Anza said on 7 Oct that the final gate was pending on mainnet, as quoted by TradingView News. The 200-millisecond step is already running on Solana’s devnet and testnet, the upgrade page says.
Faster slots mean wallets, exchanges and trading apps can see updates more often, and a submitted transaction waits less time for its turn, CoinDesk reported.
Our 4 Oct report looked at where tokenized stocks trade on Solana.
What validators pay for speed
Each block gets smaller. CoinDesk reported that the compute limit per block falls from 37.5 million units at 250 milliseconds to 30 million at 200, which keeps total processing capacity roughly unchanged.
Validators must vote more often, which raises demands on their network connections and operating costs, CoinDesk said. The window in which a transaction stays valid also shortens.
The steps were spaced out so core developers could monitor cluster performance between activations, according to Solana’s upgrade page.
SOL was trading near $110.3 as of 09:50 UTC on Friday, according to Kraken. The next milestone is the epoch 1053 boundary itself.
Related: Coin Levels on SOL
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.