Solana has completed a mainnet upgrade that reduces its target slot time from 400 milliseconds to 350ms, beginning a planned series of changes intended to bring the figure down to 200ms.
A slot is the short period during which a designated validator can produce a block of transactions on the Solana blockchain. The latest change was introduced on Friday morning and represents the first stage of SIMD-0525, a Solana upgrade proposal merged on 14 May.
The proposal sets out a route to halve the network’s longstanding target slot time. “Shorter slots reduce confirmation and finalization latency for users,” it explains. “Any consensus or commitment threshold measured in slots takes less wall-clock time as slot time decreases.”
The reduction also changes the length of Solana’s epochs. Each epoch contains 432,000 slots and previously lasted about 48 hours. Under the new 350ms target, an epoch is expected to take roughly 42 hours.
Validators remain responsible for four slots at a time, but their turns will now change every 1.4 seconds, compared with 1.6 seconds previously.
Solana developers plan to introduce three more reductions of 50ms, eventually reaching the 200ms target. Each stage will be activated separately. According to the Solana Foundation’s upgrade overview, the rollout can be paused if too many validators fail to produce blocks during their assigned slots.
A point-in-time check carried out for the article recorded that a 1,000-slot period shortly before the upgrade took 415 seconds. A later 1,000-slot period in epoch 1020 took 368 seconds.
The shorter slots are designed to reduce transaction latency, but they do not automatically increase the amount of work Solana can process each second. Validators will handle slots more frequently, while each individual slot will carry less work.
The proposal’s authors also argue that shorter slots reduce the amount of time a validator can delay or rearrange transactions before responsibility passes to the next validator.
The upgrade comes as non-voting transactions on Solana have risen notably since the beginning of the year, according to data from The Block. These transactions serve purposes beyond supporting the network.
Solana was co-founded by Anatoly Yakovenko and has previously increased the amount of work that can be included in each block. The Block reported in July 2025 that developers had proposed increasing the network’s compute limit to 100 million compute units. That limit governs how much work the network can perform while processing transactions. The change was merged and adopted on the mainnet on 29 July.
Solana has also added another major validator client, increasing the diversity of software used to operate the network. Jump Crypto’s Firedancer client, written in the C programming language, went live in December. It provides an alternative to the Rust-based Agave client and its widely used Jito-Agave fork, with the aim of improving client diversity and network resilience.
Although slot times are now moving towards 200ms, full finality remains a separate issue. Finality is the point at which the network treats a block as irreversible. Solana’s Alpenglow overhaul, which is still in development, aims to reduce finality to about 150ms, from approximately 12.8 seconds today.
The next planned slot-time target is 300ms, but developers have not announced when that stage will be activated. They intend to monitor network performance at the current 350ms setting before making any further reduction.
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