Solana Ups Block Capacity by 66% with SIMD-0286 Upgrade
Solana has activated its SIMD-0286 upgrade on July 29, 2026, which increases the maximum compute units (CU) per block from 60 to 100 million. This means each block now has 66% more capacity to process transactions without affecting the block generation time of 400 milliseconds.
Compute units are used by Solana to measure the computational cost of processing transactions. The upgrade aims to address the growing demand for applications such as decentralized exchanges (DEX), restaking, and MEV, which were causing transaction failures and higher fees during high-traffic periods. According to the Solana Foundation, 11.2% of blocks were nearing saturation by exceeding 56M CU during traffic peaks.
The upgrade is made possible thanks to the adoption of XDP technology by more than 70% of the stake, which accelerates data propagation between validators and allows capacity to be expanded without creating network bottlenecks. The new limit maintains the individual per-account limit at 12M CU while raising the total to 100M, ensuring that extra capacity is distributed across many different applications.