Solana now produces a block roughly every 0.21 seconds — half the 0.42 seconds it took in early August — after validators completed a staged upgrade over seven weeks, according to data from blockchain analytics firm Bitquery. The faster cadence rolled out in four steps between Aug. 21 and Oct. 9, and the network did not stop once during the 361-day period Bitquery examined. Data on memecoin trading further indicates that the chain's fastest bots did not lose any speed in the transition.

How Solana Cut Its Block Time

The reduction was carried out through a formal network proposal known as SIMD-0525, short for Solana Improvement Document. Validators — the computers that run the Solana network — switched the change on in four increments that moved the slot target, the interval during which one validator has the chance to produce a block, from 400 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds, with the steps beginning on Aug. 21, Aug. 28, Sept. 18, and Oct. 9. Developers could pause between steps if too many blocks went missing.

The Solana Foundation said the goals of the change were shorter waits for users and less time for any single validator to control which transactions get into a block.

Solana now makes about 407,000 blocks per day, up from 206,000. Each block holds less — roughly 95 swaps compared with 149 before — so the network handles about the same amount of work per second.

Reliability metrics improved alongside the speed gains. Skipped blocks, where a validator produces nothing during its turn, fell from 0.23% of slots to 0.05%, and the longest gap between two blocks was under 5 seconds. A typical swap by an ordinary wallet still paid about a tenth of a cent in network fees; the average fee declined from 2.7 cents in November to about 1 cent in October.

Stakers now receive rewards every 26 hours instead of every 51 hours — payouts are issued once per epoch, a fixed number of slots, so each cycle now completes in roughly half the wall-clock time — while the yearly reward rate stayed the same.

Memecoin Bots Kept Their Pace

Bitquery also tracked sniping on Pump.fun, the site where most new Solana memecoins launch. Sniping refers to racing to buy a token in its first moments.

The share of new coins bought by an outside wallet in their first block fell from 42% to 32%. The first block itself, however, also got shorter, lasting about 0.27 seconds in the later sample compared with 0.42 seconds before. Measured over a window of roughly 1.3 seconds, the share barely moved: about 53% of new coins received an outside buy in that window before the change, versus 52% after. An outside wallet means any wallet other than the coin's first buyer. Bitquery noted that the measure does not prove every early buyer was a bot.

Sandwich attacks also continued. In a sandwich, a bot buys just before another trader's swap and sells right after at the higher price that swap created. Bitquery counted about 30 sandwich patterns per 10,000 swaps in early August. The rate dropped to 21 in early September, then rose to 33 between Sept. 19 and Oct. 7.

Both bot comparisons end on Oct. 7, meaning they do not cover the final step to 200 milliseconds on Oct. 9.

A public Solana node measured actual slot times of 212 milliseconds between Oct. 22 and Oct. 25. Bitquery's figures were verified on Oct. 26, with Solana trading near $99.54, down about 20% over 30 days.

Source: Blockonomi