Jacob Creech, Vice President of Technology at the Solana Foundation, announced the recent mainnet upgrade schedule: rent reduction, Transaction V1, slot shortening, and Alpenglow will be implemented sequentially.

The first phase of rent reduction will be activated next week, corresponding to SIMD-0437. This plan will gradually reduce the lamports_per_byte parameter needed to maintain accounts from 6960 to 696, ultimately decreasing by 90%; the first phase will drop to 6333, about a 9% reduction, with the entire process executed in five independent functional gates.

This adjustment will lower the SOL required for developers and users to create and maintain on-chain accounts. For a standard SPL token account, the current rent-free deposit is about $0.159, and after all five phases are completed, it is expected to be around $0.016; each phase will independently observe the growth of on-chain status, and in case of anomalies, parameters can be restored through a rollback gate.

Transaction V1 will go live on the mainnet on September 9, expanding the maximum transaction size from 1232 bytes to 4096 bytes, approximately a 3.3 times increase. Tasks that previously required splitting or relied on address lookup tables, such as ZK proofs, large multisigs, BLS signatures, and confidential transfers, can now be accommodated in a single atomic transaction; the new format is an optional upgrade, and the old version will continue to be compatible with v0 transactions.

The slot duration will continue to shorten, but the specific date for the next round has not yet been announced. Solana has already shortened the slot to 300 milliseconds on August 28, with the target baseline for SIMD-0525 being 200 milliseconds, still requiring two reductions of 50 milliseconds each; the development team will first observe the stability of the current 300 milliseconds before proceeding.

The Alpenglow consensus upgrade is targeted for mainnet launch in October, replacing the TowerBFT consensus layer. Its fast path has achieved 96% of transactions completing final confirmation in 214 milliseconds in the test cluster, while the typical final confirmation time for TowerBFT is about 12.8 seconds; the Agave 4.3 candidate version is scheduled for release on September 4, and validators are advised to complete upgrades by September 21, with functionality activation starting as early as September 28.

In terms of market mechanisms, the rent reduction lowers the SOL lock-up threshold for account creation and multi-account applications, allowing wallets, payments, games, DeFi, and high-frequency on-chain applications to reduce users' upfront capital occupation; larger transactions, shorter slots, and faster finality enhance the feasibility of ZK, institutional-level transactions, and real-time applications. Short-term buying may flow into SOL, validator infrastructure, RPC services, development tools, and ecological applications around upgrade expectations; however, lower rent will also reduce SOL locked up due to account deposits, and validators will have to bear higher state growth, bandwidth, and hardware loads, with execution quality and mainnet stability determining whether the upgrade can translate into sustained usage.

Source: Public Information