Solana quietly crossed a meaningful threshold on July 29, 2026. The network activated SIMD-0286 on mainnet during Epoch 1009, raising the maximum block compute units from 60 million to 100 million. That 66% jump in per-block capacity is the single largest throughput expansion Solana has made in recent memory.

For context: compute units are roughly how Solana measures the computational cost of processing transactions. Think of them like seats on a plane. Before this upgrade, the plane had 60 million seats. Now it has 100 million. More transactions can fit into each block without waiting for the next one.

What SIMD-0286 actually changes

The upgrade was authored by Lucas Bruder of Jito Labs and first proposed publicly on GitHub in May 2025. It went through testnet and devnet trials before landing on mainnet, which is the standard cautious path for changes this significant.

Not everything changed, though. The writable account compute unit cap remains at 12 million CUs, and the maximum block data size delta stays at 100 MB. The upgrade is surgical: more room per block, same slot timing, zero required changes to existing applications.

Slot times also remain at 400 milliseconds. Solana did not trade latency for throughput here.

Early network observations following activation reported improved throughput for high-volume use cases, specifically DeFi and payments. No immediate technical issues were registered, which is about the best outcome a blockchain upgrade can realistically achieve on day one.

Why timing this right matters

Approximately 11% of blocks were already approaching the previous 60 million CU ceiling during peak demand periods. The network was starting to show its ceiling during exactly the moments it needed to perform most reliably.

This upgrade also builds on a prior step. SIMD-0256 raised the compute limit from 50 million to 60 million in July 2025, roughly a year before SIMD-0286 landed.

Supporting that foundation is a separate network improvement: over 70% of Solana validators have now adopted XDP networking. XDP is a low-level packet processing framework that reduces networking overhead significantly. Having that base in place before expanding block capacity is the kind of sequencing that prevents upgrades from creating new bottlenecks elsewhere in the stack.