The Solana ecosystem just wrapped up voting on three major proposals. Validators gave the thumbs up to a new governance system and agreed to speed up the rate at which SOL inflation gets reduced. On the flip side, the proposal to change the fee structure didn’t make the cut.

Key Changes Announced by Solana Foundation

Jacob Creech, VP of Technology at the Solana Foundation, shared the upcoming changes coming to the network. Starting this week, Solana will begin gradually lowering the minimum SOL balance required to store on-chain data—eventually slashing the deposit needed by 90%.

On September 9, Solana will roll out Transaction V1, a new transaction format that boosts the max message size from 1232 bytes to 4096 bytes—over triple the current limit. The team is also working to further cut block times, aiming to make the network even snappier.

Alpenglow and Transaction Finality

October is set for the launch of Alpenglow, Solana’s biggest consensus upgrade yet. If all goes as planned, this will bring transaction finality down to around 150 milliseconds.

Current Status and What’s Next

The community has already finished voting: new governance and a faster SOL inflation reduction are both approved, while the fee reform was rejected. Here’s what’s next at the protocol level: this week kicks off the drop in data storage “rent” thresholds, Transaction V1 lands on September 9, and Alpenglow is slated for October—bringing with it a major speed boost for transaction finality.