Solana cut its target slot time to 350 milliseconds on Friday, the first reduction since the network launched. Solana Foundation vice president of technology Jacob Creech called it a new era of 350ms, with 300ms next.
A slot is the window a leader has to produce a block. The original target was 400ms. Shorter slots mean more blocks per second and faster confirms. Average slot times were about 360ms at press time, already inside the new band.
The cut is the first of four 50-millisecond steps in SIMD-0525, approved and merged on May 14. The path is 350ms, then 300ms, 250ms, and 200ms. The Foundation has said 200ms is the destination: about twice the confirmation speed, with ticks per slot, the four-slot leader span, and slots per epoch left as they are.
Anza's Agave v4.2 is slated to carry all four feature gates, one epoch at a time, so the network can pause if skip rates climb. That schedule is tentative. Epochs stay at 432,000 slots. Wall-clock epoch length shrinks as each slot gets shorter.
The Foundation also treats the shorter leader window as a fairness point. Less time for one leader to monopolize block building. Faster confirms for users and tighter quotes for market makers. Validators get paid on a shorter epoch clock.
350ms is the live step, not the finish. Creech already pointed at 300ms. Skip rates, not the headline number, decide whether the next gate turns on.
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