A Major Update Proposal Has Been Submitted for Solana (SOL) – Here’s What Will Change

Jump Crypto’s Firedancer client team for Solana (SOL) has submitted a new Solana Improvement Proposal (SIMD-0370).

The proposal aims to remove the fixed block compute unit (CU) limit after the Alpenglow update.

Solana currently has a limit of 60 million CUs per block, and this limit is about to be increased to 100 million with SIMD-0286. The Firedancer team notes that this static limit is now unnecessary because with Alpenglow, blocks that cannot be processed in time can be automatically skipped.

With the new mechanism, block producers will be able to add as many transactions as possible to blocks. Slower validators will skip these blocks and lose their rewards. This will incentivize lower-performing validators to upgrade their software and hardware, while also allowing network capacity to grow based on market dynamics rather than fixed limits.

The Firedancer team argues that this change will create a “flywheel effect”: Block producers will increase their performance to add more transactions, other validators will have to keep up, and ultimately, Solana’s transaction capacity will scale with its hardware power.

If the proposal is adopted, increasing block sizes over time on Solana could mean more transaction capacity and lower congestion for users and application developers. However, experts argue that the impact of larger blocks on the network's distribution time and the potential impact on concurrent block producer designs should be carefully considered.

SIMD-0370 is currently in the “review” phase.