Solana cuts its target block time to 200 milliseconds on Friday and shrinks each block to 30 million compute units, so total capacity stays flat. Validators pay for the faster clock by voting about twice as often as under the original 400-millisecond design.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishers
- Builder
- Builder 40%
- Operator
- Operator 40%
- Investor
- Investor 20%
Reality
- Evidence72
- Adoption80
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives40
- Confidence74
Anza moved Solana's testnet and devnet to Alpenglow on Sept. 24 and 25, cutting finality from about 12.8 seconds to a 100 to 150 millisecond target. Mainnet-beta follows an observation period with no date set, the window exchanges and app teams have to retest what they count as settled.
Reality
- Evidence65
- Adoption15
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives55
- Confidence60
buildOne report1 publisher SIMD-0266 activated at the start of epoch 971 on 13 May 2026, putting p-token behind the classic token program ID on the upgradeable loader with its upgrade authority set to none. Nobody redeployed anything.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption88
- Hype gap−12
- Incentives30
- Confidence65
buildOne report1 publisher Solana's byte price has fallen 27% with three cuts still to come, leaving accounts funded at the old 6,960 lamports per byte holding a surplus that four programs let their own authority take back without closing anything.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption35
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives65
- Confidence50
buildOne report1 publisher Four SIMDs put commission into basis points and let validators split priority fees with delegators. The sharing is opt-in. The whole-percent field RPC still publishes rounds up, so a move of up to 99 basis points can hide behind it.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives22
- Confidence55
Transaction V1 went live on Solana mainnet at epoch 1035 with a 4,096-byte ceiling. Senders opt in and the older formats keep working, so the required updates fall on RPC providers, indexers and explorers.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishers
- Builder
- Builder 37%
- Operator
- Operator 30%
- Investor
- Investor 33%
Reality
- Evidence80
- Adoption52
- Hype gap+28
- Incentives60
- Confidence72
The September 9 format change is optional for senders and mandatory for anyone parsing blocks, and the Jito bundle data Anza used to size it says a 4,096-byte ceiling absorbs between half and two thirds of the workloads that needed a workaround.
Reality
- Evidence60
- Adoption38
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives58
- Confidence55
The first gate delivers about a tenth of that saving and only on testnet, and because the deposit was always refundable, what issuers actually gain is the carry on money the network gave back anyway.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption25
- Hype gap+40
- Incentives75
- Confidence55
Transaction v1 heads to testnet in late August 2026 with a 3.3x bigger payload. It also deletes Address Lookup Tables, which 62% of sampled traffic was using.
Reality
- Evidence42
- Adoption24
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence44
buildOne report1 publisher SIMD-0437 walks the per-byte deposit from 6,960 lamports to 696 in five gated steps. It is not retroactive, so pre-activation accounts refund ten times what their replacements will.
Reality
- Evidence24
- Adoption28
- Hype gap+31
- Incentives82
- Confidence31