Solana Mainnet Hits 300ms Slot Time, Liquidity Providers May Gain
Solana's mainnet has reached a new milestone with a slot time of just 300 milliseconds, significantly faster than its previous speed. This upgrade is expected to reduce the time it takes for trading bots to extract value from outdated pool prices, benefiting liquidity providers who can now keep more of this value.
The Solana Foundation's analysis found that conventional Automated Market Makers (AMMs) will see the most benefit from this faster execution speed. With shorter intervals between block production, AMMs will have less time for external prices to move far enough to make an arbitrage trade profitable after the pool's trading fee.
The research also suggests that proprietary market makers will benefit from fresher signals and improved quotes, but their gains may not be as significant as those of conventional pools. Meanwhile, validators who still submit votes as on-chain transactions can expect a recurring expense due to more frequent leader opportunities.
The Solana Foundation's Alpenglow consensus activation remains a separate step, with a Validator Admission Ticket (VAT) replacing on-chain voting fees. The current slot-time specification scales the VAT from 1.6 SOL per epoch at 400ms through 0.8 SOL at 200ms.