Crypto: Solana will soon move to 200 millisecond blocks

Solana is preparing to complete an acceleration that began in August. The crypto network must reduce its target time between two blocks from 250 to 200 milliseconds during epoch 1053, expected on October 9. At this rate, five block production opportunities can appear every second, compared to 2.5 when Solana was still running at 400ms. Blockchain is going faster, but its overall theoretical capacity is not doubling.

The Solana crypto ends its race towards 200 milliseconds

The final level comes three weeks after Solana went from 300 to 250 milliseconds. This new reduction is scheduled to take effect on the border of epoch 1053, around 3 p.m. UTC according to Anza, the team developing the Agave validator client. The schedule will have been quick. Solana was still operating with a target of 400ms before August 21. The network then increased to 350 ms, then 300 ms on August 28 and 250 ms on September 18.

200 ms is the last step of the SIMD-0525 plan. A slot is the short period of time that a designated validator can produce a block. By reducing this window, wallets, trading applications and exchanges receive new information from the blockchain more frequently.

At 400ms, Solana was aiming for around 2.5 block opportunities per second. At 200 ms, this number increases to five. Twice as often.

Twice as many blocks, but not twice as much capacity

This is the most important nuance of the upgrade. Solana doesn’t just double everything. When the network operated with 400 ms slots, each block could contain up to 60 million compute units. At 250 ms, this cap had already fallen to 37.5 million.

At 200msit increases to 30 million. Blocks arrive twice as often as with the old configuration, but each has about half as much computing capacity. The total theoretical quantity of work carried out per second therefore remains close to its former level.

The crypto network mainly seeks to reduce latency. This project accompanies other recent changes. In September, Solana also increased the maximum size of certain transactions from 1,232 to 4,096 bytes, allowing in particular to better manage certain zero-knowledge proofs and multisignature operations.

However, actual performances remain slightly behind theoretical values. With a target of 250 ms, Solana Compass has observed average times around 266 to 269 ms over several recent epochs. So the network was about 16-19ms slower than its nominal target. The first complete epoch at 200 ms will allow us to see if this gap persists.

Validators will have to keep up with the new pace

Speeding up Solana’s clock also imposes more constraints. Validators will continue to produce blocks in groups of four consecutive slots. Their continuous production window thus goes from 1.6 seconds under the old configuration to only 800 milliseconds.

Less time to organize transactions. This could limit certain strategies consisting of delaying a transaction or exploiting a momentary price difference with another platform. But validators will also have to vote more often. Those who submit a vote at every slot could see their costs rise sharply, while still needing network connections that can keep up.

Wallets also have less time to use a recent blockhash before it expires. Operations requiring manual validation or offline signature can therefore become a little more delicate.

Solana already has significant activity to support. By the end of September, the value of tokenized assets on the network had reached a record $4.6 billion. The change to 200 ms does not directly create more capacity to absorb this activity. Above all, it gives a faster pace to the existing infrastructure. From 400 to 200 milliseconds in less than two months. For Solana, the next test will no longer be to reduce the figure displayed. You will really have to hold 200 ms.