Solana Cuts Slot Time to 350 Milliseconds

Solana lowered its slot time to 350 milliseconds, marking the first reduction since the network launched, Jacob Creech, the Solana Foundation’s vice president of technology, wrote on X.

Slot time is the interval at which the network schedules and confirms blocks. Shortening the interval reduces transaction latency and speeds confirmation times.

The change follows technical proposal SIMD-0525, which was approved and merged into the codebase on May 14. That merge made the shorter timing available for validators to deploy.

At press time average slot times were about 360 milliseconds, down from the network’s original 400 millisecond target, according to the Solana slot time explorer.

In June the Solana Foundation laid out a plan to move slot times from 400 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds in four stages, each cutting the slot length by 50 milliseconds. All stages are targeted for mainnet activation as part of Agave v4.2, a validator client developed by Anza, but the foundation described the rollout schedule as tentative.

Further reductions will require validators to upgrade to the Agave v4.2 client when the remaining stages are enabled. Developers and node operators will need to coordinate client upgrades and testing as the network advances through the planned stages.

Creech wrote, “We’re in a new era of 350ms. Next stop, 300ms.”