Solana's Block Capacity Doubles with Upcoming Compute Limit Increase
The Solana blockchain is set to undergo a significant upgrade in July 2026, increasing its mainnet block compute limit by 66% from 60 million to 100 million compute units (CUs). This change, known as SIMD-0286, was authored by Jito Labs and has already been live on testnet and devnet.
The increase in block capacity is expected to allow more transactions to be processed within each block without changing how apps are built. According to the official 100M CU Blocks page, this marks the second major jump in about a year, with the previous limit raised from 50 million to 60 million via an earlier proposal in July 2025.
The upgrade is designed to improve network performance and prepare for higher trading and payment volume. The per-account write limits will remain capped at 12 million CUs, but the extra room will be allocated towards parallel activity rather than individual accounts.
Engineers consider this jump safe due to over 70% of mainnet stake already running XDP, a kernel-bypass networking method that helps handle larger blocks. The upgrade is scheduled to go live at the start of Epoch 1009 and will be closely monitored for its impact on validator performance and transaction efficiency.