In brief
- If approved, it would enable Solana blocks to expand dynamically, rather than being capped.
- Validators with less powerful machines could forego oversized blocks through a skip-vote.
- Supporters see increased throughput, while critics warn of risks associated with centralization.
Solana developers are weighing a new proposal to remove block limits once the network’s planned Alpenglow upgrade takes effect, a change aimed at expanding throughput by letting performance scale with validator hardware.
Filed Friday as SIMD-0370, the proposal would scrap Solana’s current 60 million compute unit cap per block and instead allow block size to adjust dynamically, meaning blocks could expand to fit as many transactions as the fastest validators can handle, while smaller validators could simply skip voting on blocks that exceed their capacity.
Validators on Solana are the independent operators who run nodes to process transactions and secure the network, earning rewards through staking and transaction fees.
Lifting Solana’s block cap could raise throughput by letting stronger validators pack in more transactions, but it may also tilt rewards toward operators with bigger machines, which, in effect, creates a trade-off between scaling capacity and keeping the validator set broad.
“The current incentive structure for validator clients and program developers is broken,” the proposal submitted by the Firedancer development team at Jump Crypto reads. “The capacity of the network is determined not by the capabilities of the hardware but by the arbitrary block compute unit limit.”
Jump Crypto is the digital assets arm of Chicago-based Jump Trading Group. Earlier this month, Jump Crypto provided funding for Forward Industries’ $1.65 billion PIPE deal, alongside Galaxy Digital and Multicoin Capital, to help establish a public Solana treasury strategy, making Forward a vehicle to hold and deploy Solana tokens at scale.
Proposal pushback
Still, the change has sparked debate among developers and community members on the GitHub proposal thread.
Some warn that removing caps may tilt the playing field in favor of well-funded operators, who can deploy high-end hardware and potentially squeeze out smaller validators while increasing the risk of centralization.
Others have raised concerns that overly large blocks could cause propagation delays or weaken security if too many validators abstain from voting. The Jump Crypto team did not immediately return Decrypt’s request for comment.
In Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade, the skip-vote feature allows smaller validators to abstain from blocks they can’t keep up with, thereby maintaining consensus even under load.
Expected later this year, Alpenglow already promises to cut block finality from roughly 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds while adding new features such as skip votes.
The Firedancer proposal would build on that foundation by tying Solana’s capacity to validator performance rather than protocol-set ceilings.
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