Solana Slots Are Going to 200 ms: What Halves, What Shrinks
Originally published on xroot.dev . Solana's slot has been 400 milliseconds since genesis. The plan to halve it — SIMD-0525 — is usually explained as "blocks get faster", which is the least interesting thing it does. The interesting part is everything that was quietly denominated in slots because slots were a fixed unit of time, and now is not. Your blockhash expires in 150 slots. An epoch is…
Solana is planning to reduce its slot time from 400 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds, with intermediate steps of 350, 300, and 250 milliseconds. This change is expected to improve performance by making blocks faster and smaller. The reduction is implemented through four separate feature gates, each activated when 95% of stake runs software supporting the new time.
The change will affect various metrics such as blockhash expiration, epoch duration, and stake warming up. The overall impact will be a halving of block size and compute limits, which could affect large transactions and popular pools.
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