The Solana reduced its target slot time from 300 to 250 milliseconds, making the mainnet produce up to four slots per second. The change took effect on Friday (18) and represents an acceleration of nearly 17% in the network's pace.
The new interval is the shortest ever adopted on Solana's main network. In August, the protocol had first gone from 400 to 350 milliseconds and then to 300 milliseconds, as part of a gradual upgrade intended to bring slots to 200 ms.
On Solana, a slot is the window in which a designated validator can produce a block. With the 250 ms interval, applications such as wallets, exchanges, and trading platforms can receive more recent information about the state of the blockchain, reducing the time between network updates.
More speed does not mean greater capacity
The reduction in the interval between slots does not proportionally increase the total number of transactions that Solana can process. The SIMD-0525, the technical document that defines the change, also reduces the computation and data limits allowed in each slot to keep the capacity processed per unit of time approximately stable.
With 250 ms, Solana's epochs, composed of 432,000 slots, now have a theoretical duration of about 30 hours, compared with approximately 36 hours with 300 ms slots. The period during which the same leader controls four consecutive slots also falls to about 1 second.
This shortening of the leadership windows is one of the technical justifications for the upgrade. In addition to reducing latency, smaller slots reduce the period in which a single validator maintains continuous control over block production, according to the protocol proposal.
The 250 ms stage is the third of the four reductions planned by SIMD-0525. The final goal is to reach 200 milliseconds per slot, equivalent to five slots per second, but there is still no confirmed date for this configuration to take effect on mainnet.
