Solana (SOL) saw a successful mainnet upgrade on Friday morning that cuts the network's target slot time to 350 milliseconds (ms), down 50 ms from its former target of 400 ms.
A slot is the short period of time in which a designated validator can produce a block of transactions of Solana's blockchain.
The change was the first step under SIMD-0525, a Solana upgrade proposal merged on May 14 that outlines a path to eventually cutting the target slot time to just 200 ms, half its longtime value.
"Shorter slots reduce confirmation and finalization latency for users," the proposal explains.
"Any consensus or commitment threshold measured in slots takes less wall-clock time as slot time decreases." The change also shortens Solana's epochs, which each contain 432,000 slots, meaning an epoch that used to take about 48 hours should now only take about 42 hours.
