Solana Developers Propose 66% Block Capacity Increase to Address Rising Network Demand

Solana developers are weighing a significant network upgrade to expand block capacity by 66%, responding to escalating demand for compute-intensive applications.

A newly introduced proposal, SIMD-0286, recommends raising Solana’s per-block compute limit from 60 million to 100 million compute units (CUs). The initiative, published by core contributors this week, aims to accommodate the growing transaction volume and support advanced use cases like decentralized exchanges (DEXs), maximal extractable value (MEV) systems, and restaking protocols.

According to the proposal, block limits exist to ensure that the majority of validators can keep pace with the network. However, current mainnet traffic appears unconstrained by block execution times, suggesting that there’s room for a meaningful capacity upgrade.

“This proposal targets a substantial increase in block limits to 100 million CUs to provide additional capacity to the network,” the document states.

Solana currently operates on a 400-millisecond block time, with enforced limits on compute usage per block. Earlier this month, the network implemented SIMD-0256, which increased the compute cap from 50 million to 60 million CUs. But with developer activity surging, further expansion is now being considered necessary.

Under SIMD-0286, validators would be able to opt in to the 100 million CU ceiling through a software upgrade, which will be rolled out in a future epoch upon adoption.

Importantly, the proposed upgrade only affects the Max Block Units limit, which governs total compute capacity per block. Other constraints — such as the Max Writable Account Units, which cap the number of times an account can be modified within a block — remain unchanged.

As a result, the increased compute budget will primarily benefit parallelizable, non-vote transactions, including DeFi swaps and NFT mints, without adding undue strain on individual accounts.