- Jump Crypto’s SIMD-0370 plan removes Solana’s block limit, boosting performance but pressuring smaller validators.
- Alpenglow upgrade aims to cut Solana transaction finality to 150 ms, enhancing speed and network resilience.
Jump Crypto has presented a proposal to completely remove the fixed compute block limit on Solana. SIMD-0370 is poised to enable better network performance and motivate validators to upgrade their hardware.
Proposal Targets Block Limits
Jump Crypto is building the Firedancer validator client for Solana. The company filed SIMD-0370 after Alpenglow passed with almost unanimous support earlier this month. Alpenglow is slated for testnet release in December, according to Solana research entity Anza.
Solana’s compute block limit is currently fixed at 60 million compute units. Under the new plan, block size would scale with validator capacity. Anza explained:
This creates a performance flywheel: block producers pack more transactions to earn more fees. Validators that skip blocks lose rewards, so they upgrade hardware and optimize code. Better performance across the network means producers can safely push limits further.
1/ SIMD-0370, by Jump’s Firedancer team, proposes removing Solana’s fixed compute unit block limit after Alpenglow. This would eliminate static caps on block limits and have validators skip blocks they can’t process in time. Here’s what changes 🧵 pic.twitter.com/xge1IViKnH
— Anza (@anza_xyz) September 27, 2025
In addition, the proposal is part of ongoing efforts to improve Solana’s speed and stability. Firedancer launched on mainnet in September 2024 with limited capacity. It is intended to provide redundancy and help diversify validator clients beyond Solana Labs’ software.
Solana has grown in usage due to fast, low-cost transactions and active decentralized applications. Its decentralized exchange trading volumes have at times surpassed Ethereum’s this year. The network, however, has experienced outages during heavy demand, driving interest in upgrades that reduce downtime.
Debate Over Centralization
Not all developers support removing the block cap. Engineer Akhilesh Singhania wrote on GitHub:
Another type of centralization that we might see is that if the bigger validators keep upgrading to more expensive hardware, the smaller ones who cannot afford to upgrade would be forced to drop out. So as a result, we might end up with fewer big validators.
The discussion follows an earlier proposal by Jito Labs CEO Lucas Bruder in May. That plan, SIMD-0286, suggested raising the compute limit to 100 million units instead of eliminating the cap.
Anza has called the Alpenglow upgrade the largest protocol update in Solana’s history. It is expected to cut transaction finality from 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds. Other improvements will focus on resilience and validator efficiency.
Beyond protocol changes, at the All-In Summit 2025, Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko spoke about the risks of quantum computing. He estimated a 50% chance of a breakthrough within five years. Yakovenko said Bitcoin must adopt quantum-resistant cryptography soon, warning that the pace of artificial intelligence research may shorten the timeframe.
