100 Million Compute Units: Solana's New Block Limit Is Live
SIMD-0286 increases the compute budget per block from 60 to 100 million compute units — roughly 66 percent more capacity. The change went live on mainnet on 29 July 2026 with epoch 1009.
What happened
Solana has raised the compute budget per block: SIMD-0286 increases the limit from 60 to 100 million compute units — a gain of roughly 66 percent. Per Solana, the change went live on mainnet on 29 July 2026 at the start of epoch 1009, following earlier activations on testnet and devnet.
What it means
Compute units (CU) measure the computational work of a transaction. Every block has a total budget of them — once it is exhausted, further transactions wait for the next block. A higher limit means: more transactions, or more complex program calls, fit into the same block.
That matters most during peak periods — think in-demand token launches or liquidation waves, when many transactions compete for block space simultaneously. Solana backs the need with a figure: recently, roughly one in nine blocks ran close to the old ceiling. How compute units, base fee, and priority fees relate is covered in our background piece Solana fees explained.
What does NOT change
One detail that sets expectations straight: the limit for individual writable accounts stays at 12 million compute units. So if demand concentrates on one contested account — say the pool of an in-demand token — that bottleneck remains. What went up is the block’s total budget, not the per-account ceiling. That is exactly the separation Solana’s local fee markets rest on: congestion in one place should not make the rest of the network more expensive.
Per Solana, the step only became feasible thanks to the spread of XDP — the faster data propagation between validators — which now covers more than 70 percent of stake.
Update: first market open handled
Hours after activation, Brennan Watt, CEO of client developer Anza, reported that the network had come through its first US market open under the new limit. Per Watt, raising the limit was the easy part technically; the work was keeping slot times stable at 400 milliseconds as blocks grow larger. Anza names 200-millisecond slots as the next target.
Update (July 31, 2026): The First On-Chain Data
Two days after activation, Solana shared an analysis by Pine Analytics. The key numbers:
- 10 to 23 percent of blocks now exceed the old 60 million limit — actually using the new capacity.
- The median block stays at around 30 million CU — normal operation fills nowhere near the budget.
- Fees at the 90th percentile dropped by roughly 30 percent.
- Only about 0.5 percent of blocks approach the new 100 million cap.
Important for operators
Per Solana, the change brings no breaking changes — only the maximum CU budget per block goes up. Anyone running infrastructure should nevertheless check that their stack handles larger blocks: this affects validators, RPC providers, and indexers alike, since there is more data per block to process and serve. What an RPC node actually does is covered in Solana RPC explained.
Context
The increase is a parameter step, not an architectural overhaul — it joins a series of incremental capacity raises the network has seen over past years. More capacity per block also does not automatically mean more throughput: the budget is only used if demand is there.
Note: This is reporting, not investment advice.
What to watch
- Whether validators and RPC providers stay stable under the larger blocks
- Whether anything unusual shows up in the first epochs after activation
- How much of the additional budget is actually used during peaks
Sources
- Solana — 100M CU Blocks (official upgrade page)
- Solana / Pine Analytics — First on-chain data on X
- Solana — Activation post on X
- Solana Devs — Announcement on X