Solana Speed Upgrade Nears Completion with 250ms Slot Activation Set for September 18

Solana is entering its final stretch for the speed upgrade, which will bring 250ms slot activation to the mainnet on September 18. According to Anza, a Solana-focused software development firm, 250ms slot activation is now pending on the mainnet-beta and will go live at epoch 1037 boundary around 05:01 UTC on Friday, September 18.

As part of this upgrade, Solana is reducing its slot times in stages from 400ms to 200ms. The current stage involves a reduction to 250ms slots activation, which Anza refers to as '1 more step to 200ms.'

The reduction to 200ms will allow the network to produce twice as many blocks per day as it did at 400ms, making Solana more competitive with other blockchain protocols. This change is beneficial to all users, market makers, and validators, who will experience faster confirmation times for transactions and shorter epochs.

The upgrade aims to set a precedent for future latency improvements and has been spaced out to give core developers time to monitor cluster performance between activations. The activation dates for the 200ms slot time are still being determined by core developers.