Solana has lowered its blockchain slot time to 350 milliseconds, the first such reduction since the network's inception, as it works toward a 200-millisecond target designed to cut network latency.

The change was confirmed by Jacob Creech, vice president of technology at the Solana Foundation. “We're in a new era of 350ms. Next stop, 300ms,” Creech wrote in a Friday X post.

Slot time is the fixed interval during which a designated leader validator produces blocks on the network. Shortening that interval allows blocks, and the transactions within them, to be produced and confirmed more quickly. Latency has become a key competitive metric among high-performance blockchains, and confirmation speed is particularly consequential for time-sensitive applications such as on-chain trading and payments, where the gap between submitting a transaction and seeing it finalized directly shapes user experience.

According to the Solana slot time explorer, average slot times stood at 360 milliseconds at press time, down from the network's original 400-millisecond target, which had been in place since genesis.

In June, the Solana Foundation shared plans to reduce slot times from 400 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds, arguing that the change would improve latency and accelerate confirmations on the blockchain network. Three further 50-millisecond reductions are planned under the upgrade roadmap, taking the network from 350ms to 300ms, then to 250ms, and finally to the 200ms goal.

All four stages are targeted for mainnet activation in Agave v4.2, a validator client developed by Anza, one of the core engineering teams in the Solana ecosystem, though the schedule remains tentative. Because shorter slot intervals mean blocks are produced more frequently, each successive cut raises the performance demands placed on validators and the network infrastructure connecting them.

SIMD-0525, the proposal establishing the shorter slot times, was approved and merged on May 14, according to the improvement document on GitHub.