Solana to Boost Block Capacity by 66% with SIMD-0286 Upgrade

The Solana blockchain is reportedly gearing up for another major scalability leap, with its block capacity poised to go from 60 million to 100 million Compute Units (CUs) under the SIMD-0286 upgrade first proposed in May.

This 66% increase comes just a day after the network successfully raised its block limit to 60M CUs in epoch 822, signaling an aggressive push to improve throughput and reduce congestion.

SIMD-0286

The news was first broken by SolanaFloor, which reported that the network’s block capacity would rise from 60 million to 100 million CUs. The outlet also indicated that implementation could occur “today,” attributing the claim to Solana research and development firm Anza.

If ratified, SIMD-0286 would follow a series of incremental upgrades, including SIMD-0207 to 50 million CUs, then SIMD-0256 to 60 million, aimed at maintaining Solana’s edge against Ethereum rollups and other scaling solutions.

On-chain data shows that SIMD-0256, the 60 million CU increase, had activated at Slot 355,104,000 during Epoch 822. Brennan Watt, vice-president of Core Engineering at Anza, later took to X, describing the 60M CU as a “warm up,” before later declaring, “100M already merged. I love it here.”

Asked by Squads Labs protocol engineer Orion what version SIMD-0286 would land in, Watt responded, “3.0 if implemented today.”

Compute Units function much like Ethereum’s gas. They measure the amount of computational resources needed for transactions and smart-contract executions. Since May 2025, when Solana developers opened SIMD-0286 on GitHub, the community has debated the performance-versus-stability trade-offs.

While some validators acknowledged the potential for dramatic throughput gains, with Solana already supporting over 2,000 TPS on the mainnet, others cautioned that larger blocks demand more rigorous testing to avoid replay attacks or network slowdowns historically seen during the September 2021 outage.

Higher CU limits could unlock new decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web3 gaming use cases, possibly reduce failed transactions during peak demand, and help Solana absorb institutional inflows like those from DeFi Development Corp and SOL Strategies.

Market Impact

While developers and validators weigh in on the GitHub discussions, Solana’s native SOL token has dipped in the market after briefly reclaiming the $200 level on July 22, its highest since June 6, before profit-taking set in.

At the time of this writing, the token was trading at $183.05, down 9.1% in the last 24 hours. However, over the past week, SOL has risen 6.6%, outpacing Bitcoin’s modest 2% gains, though it remains 37.7% below its January 19 all-time high of $293.31.

Additionally, monthly and quarterly trends show 25.8% and 16.4% gains, respectively, suggesting there’s still sustained bullish momentum despite the recent volatility.