Solana developers have filed a draft proposal to remove durable nonces, a feature that keeps a signed transaction valid until someone sends it, with a stated earliest mainnet date of 5 May 2027.
The proposal, SIMD-0723, was opened on 5 Nov and lists Gabe R. of Anza, a main developer of Solana’s validator software, as its author. It is still a draft, and its pull request was open on Monday.
Solana is a so-called layer 1, a blockchain with its own validators, the computers that confirm transactions and are paid in SOL.
Normally a Solana transaction expires about 150 blocks after the “blockhash” it carries, which the Solana Foundation puts at roughly 30 seconds at the network’s 200-millisecond slots.
A durable nonce swaps that blockhash for a stored value, so the transaction never expires. Exchanges, custodians and stablecoin issuers use it for air-gapped signing, where approvals take longer than 30 seconds.
After activation, “every transaction needs a recent blockhash,” the draft says. The System Program would stop creating or advancing nonce accounts, though withdrawing from them would still work.
The draft gives affected users “at least six months to migrate, counted from this proposal’s publication on 2026-11-05,” and says the feature “will not be activated on mainnet-beta before 2027-05-05.”
The Foundation’s own page, dated October, says no date is set and puts removal roughly six months after a replacement is ready, so the real date could be later than 5 May.
Why remove it? The draft lists special rules durable nonces force on every validator client, and a series of incidents tied to them, including a 2022 failure that halted mainnet for about 4.5 hours.
The pull request also needs approval from at least one Anza and one Firedancer engineer before it can be merged, according to the repository’s bot.
Who has to change
Most users will not notice. Normal transactions and wallets are unaffected, the Foundation says; only people and firms that use durable nonces must act.
The replacement is an onchain program that checks an offline signature. Two candidates are under development: Anza’s Programmatic Signer, which is on devnet and awaiting audit, and Blueshift’s Vector.
The Foundation says the programs work today, so teams can test on devnet now. Moving funds means shifting authorities to a program-controlled address.
There is a cost beyond the migration. The draft warns that “a failed execution can leave an authorization usable,” so a failed submission is not a revocation, as CoinDesk quotes it.
Durable nonces also drew attention in April. CoinDesk reports that attackers used pre-signed durable-nonce transactions in the Drift exploit, a theft of at least $270 million, which we covered. The SIMD does not mention Drift.
Durable nonces were also a small part of traffic with a large fee footprint. In one June epoch they were 3.1% of transactions but 30% of priority fees, and 555 fee payers sent 97.5% of them, the Foundation page says, citing a SIMD discussion.
Solana has changed its transaction clock before, with 200-millisecond slots and Alpenglow. This is another step in tightening the rules around when a transaction is valid.
SOL traded at $85.92 as of 10:50 UTC on Monday, according to Kraken. The next milestone is the proposal’s review by Anza and Firedancer engineers; there is no vote date.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.