Solana takes its first step toward sub-second speed by cutting block confirmation times across the network

Solana’s mainnet is producing blocks faster after its first staged slot-time reduction moved the network’s target from 400 milliseconds to 350 milliseconds.Faster slots shorten block-level feedback and confirmation thresholds measured in slots, while throughput depends on a separate set of limits.The Solana Foundation confirmed the mainnet change after the feature gate activated at slot 440,208,000, the first slot of epoch 1019. A feature gate is the switch validators use to coordinate a protocol change, and under the one-epoch delay required by SIMD-0525, the new timing applied when epoch 1020 began on Aug. 21.A slot is the window in which a designated validator can produce a block, while an epoch is a fixed period of 432,000 slots.Trillium, a Solana validator-telemetry provider, measured a slot-weighted mean of 365.4ms across 431,505 timed slots in post-change epoch 1021. Its view of pre-change epoch 1015 recorded a 420.7ms mean.The same dataset recorded 331 skipped slots in epoch 1021, or 0.077%, compared with 1,890 skips and 0.438% in epoch 1015. The lower post-change reading offers an early stability signal across those two epochs, though the comparison cannot establish that t...