Solana Mainnet Upgrade: Slot Time Reduced to 350ms

BlockBeats News, August 19th, Solana core developer and Anza CEO Brennan Watt posted a message stating that Solana is activating its first Slot time reduction upgrade on the mainnet, expecting to decrease the block time from the current ~400 milliseconds to 350 milliseconds. This adjustment is set to take effect starting from Epoch 1020.

Brennan Watt reminded developers that this upgrade has a transitional phase issue. Currently, some SDK constants (including DEFAULT_MS_PER_SLOT) have not been updated to the new parameters, and the official team will release a version with the latest values after the feature is activated. Additionally, this feature adopts a delayed activation mechanism: the feature will be in a pending activation state in Epoch E, activated in Epoch E+1, and only fully effective in Epoch E+2.

He suggested that applications relying on SDK constants to match the actual Slot time on the mainnet should add adaptation logic during the transition period, such as setting up a feature switching mechanism based on Epoch Slot boundaries to avoid service disruptions due to changes in time parameters.

Brennan Watt stated that in the long term, Solana will migrate these network parameters on-chain to allow clients to query them directly. However, the team currently needs to complete this upgrade first, describing this process as similar to Solana's early "difficult but rapid iteration" development phase.

According to him, the team expects that the vast majority of nodes will achieve the "two Slot delay" target in most cases, and the relevant restrictions will be further relaxed in Anza v4.3.