Solana now makes a block every 200 milliseconds, twice as fast as in August, and Alpenglow is next

Solana has finished a seven-week push to make its blocks come twice as fast as before. At epoch 1053 on Friday, the network's target slot time dropped from 250 milliseconds to 200. Anza, which builds the Agave validator software, confirmed the change on mainnet at 14:42 UTC, according to Solana Compass.

It was the last of four cuts under a proposal called SIMD-0525. Slots went from 400 to 350 milliseconds on August 21, to 300 on August 28 and to 250 on September 18.

Faster slots mean a block-production chance every fifth of a second, five a second instead of 2.5. Each block carries less, though: CoinDesk said the maximum compute per block falls from 37.5 million units to 30 million, keeping theoretical capacity about the same.

There are costs. Validators that vote on every slot must vote about twice as often, and wallets have less time to use a recent blockhash, which can complicate transactions that are signed offline or approved by hand. Each earlier step also ran 15 to 19 milliseconds slower than its target, Solana Compass said.

"Next up, Alpenglow," Jacob Creech of the Solana Foundation wrote. That upgrade targets 150-millisecond finality and has no mainnet date yet.

What to watch: the real average slot time over the next few days, and a date for Alpenglow.