Entity background
Solana is a Layer 1 blockchain for smart contracts and onchain applications: programs execute logic, accounts store state, and SOL pays network fees and supports network security. Protocol upgrades, validator operations, client implementations, and ecosystem incidents can affect network availability.
Current focus
xiyu.news has tracked 9 related reports since 2026-08-28. The latest focus is “Solana DEX volume spike hides circular trades, and automated bots are blamed”. 7 continuing event timelines connect the coverage over time.
Recent developments
9 entries- #01
Solana DEX volume spike hides circular trades, and automated bots are blamed
Bitquery's Sept. 24 reconstruction of $201.4 billion in Solana DEX trades recorded between Aug. 24 and Sept. 22 classified 58.4% of that sample, or $117.7 billion, as circular or botlike activity. About $111.6 billion of the flagged amount — roughly 95% — involved buying and selling the same token through the same pool inside a single transaction. The finding challenges the use of gross DEX volume as a stand-in for demand from independent traders, since a large share of recorded Solana turnover came from repeated round trips rather than distinct users. Bitquery also notes it did not measure executable liquidity, leaving the market depth actually available to outside traders unknown. Bitquery identified two clusters of 20 and 50 wallets with strikingly similar trading records that together accounted for $26.3 billion of the flagged amount; it grouped wallets by volume and token counts without tracing their funding. The sample covered only trades priced in SOL, USDC or USDT in pools in its index, and Bitquery said fewer of its checks could run on Solana than on other chains it studied, so the figure reflects one window under its own rules rather than a rate for all Solana DEX trading.
- #02
Solana moves Alpenglow into testnet as SOL nears January highs
Solana has begun rolling its Alpenglow consensus overhaul onto testnet, the first public deployment of the upgrade that replaces TowerBFT with the Votor voting mechanism. Anza, the developer behind Solana's Agave validator client, said testnet is entering the rollout process, ahead of deployments on devnet and eventually mainnet-beta. The rollout is the first broad environment in which validators and infrastructure providers can run Alpenglow before it advances to devnet and mainnet. The migration requires those operators to adjust systems that stream blocks, track votes, or rely on Solana's existing commitment structure. The upgrade targets finality of about 150 milliseconds, down from roughly 12.8 seconds under TowerBFT, while leaving the Solana Virtual Machine, transactions, programs and fees unchanged. Its first phase introduces Votor, which replaces onchain vote transactions with votes sent directly between validators and combined into certificates that can finalize a block in one or two voting rounds, cutting the wait for an irreversible transaction by about 99%; Rotor, a replacement for the Turbine block-data distribution system, is scheduled separately.
- #03
Solana Cuts Target Slot Time to 250ms in Third Speed Upgrade
Solana reduced its target slot time from 300 milliseconds to 250 milliseconds, a roughly 17% faster block-production cadence and the network's third such cut since August. The change is the third of four planned stages under the SIMD-0525 proposal, which has walked slot time down from 400ms at genesis to 350ms, then 300ms, and now 250ms. Faster slots shorten the gap between blockchain settlement and the near-instant confirmations users expect from traditional exchanges, which mainly benefits latency-sensitive applications such as oracles and automated market makers. This matters because Solana competes for high-frequency trading and DeFi activity on execution freshness, even though raw transaction throughput is unchanged. This is not a capacity upgrade: each shorter slot is allotted proportionally less computation and data, so the network carries the same total load in smaller, more frequent pieces. Because an epoch is fixed at 432,000 slots, the compressed slot time shortens the expected epoch length from roughly 36 hours to about 30 hours, quietly accelerating staking rewards and validator schedules; a final step to 200ms has no mainnet activation date and will only proceed if block-skip rates stay in check.
- #04
Solana Raises Transaction Size Limit to 4,096 Bytes With v1 Format
Solana activated its v1 transaction format on mainnet at the start of epoch 1,035, around 01:00 UTC on Tuesday, raising the maximum serialized transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes. The upgrade is backward compatible, so legacy and v0 transactions keep working, but applications must opt in to v1 to use the larger size. The change removes a long-standing structural bottleneck for Solana developers, who previously had to split complex operations across multiple transactions and now can pack zero-knowledge proofs, multi-signature approvals and new onchain signature schemes into a single all-or-nothing transaction. It narrows the functional gap with Ethereum, which has no rigid per-transaction size cap and instead relies on a flexible block gas limit. The increase concerns how much data each transaction can carry, not how many transactions Solana processes per second, and protocols that want the extra room must update to v1 transactions while wallets and existing applications remain unaffected. The v1 format also changes how accounts are referenced on the wire, which is tied to the address lookup table trade-off that Solana's own write-up highlights.
- #05
Coinbase Launches Regulated BTC, ETH and SOL Derivatives in Canada
Coinbase has launched regulated crypto derivatives in Canada, giving eligible users access to perpetual and dated futures on Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Solana (SOL) and other assets. The launch covers 23 futures contracts and supports leverage up to 10x. This marks one of the largest regulated crypto derivatives offerings for Canadian retail and institutional clients, expanding Coinbase's 'Everything Exchange' strategy beyond spot trading. Broader derivatives access can deepen market participation and give traders regulated hedging tools for BTC, ETH and SOL. According to reports, the derivatives suite includes 23 futures contracts and leverage up to 10x. The products are offered only to eligible Canadian users and are subject to Canada's regulated derivatives framework.
- #06
Hidden Solana v1 Upgrade Flaws Can Freeze RPC Readers and Disable Fee Limits
Solana's v1 transaction format, which raises the maximum payload from 1,232 to 4,096 bytes, can freeze RPC readers that do not opt in and can silently disable ComputeBudget-based fee limits for indexers and sponsors. The format is active on testnet and devnet but not yet activated on mainnet as of September 4. RPC clients, indexers, relayers, and fee sponsors that fail to update could experience hard outages or enforce incorrect resource and fee limits once the first v1 transaction appears. This makes the pre-activation window a compatibility deadline for nearly all Solana infrastructure operators. Consumers must set maxSupportedTransactionVersion: 1 for getTransaction, getBlock, and blockSubscribe, otherwise v1 requests return error -32015, whole blocks fail, and subscriptions emit null. V1 moves compute-unit and priority-fee data into a transactionConfig object, so stale indexers may report zero compute budgets; Geyser/gRPC consumers must regenerate protobuf stubs and check field 7 before reading the version flag.
- #07
Solana Approves Doubled Disinflation, Slashing SOL Issuance by 2029
Solana validators passed SGP-0002, doubling the disinflation rate from 15% to 30%, so SOL's issuance floor of 1.5% will be reached in 2029 instead of 2032. The vote closed at 67.0% support, barely clearing the 66.67% threshold, with 60.7% quorum participation. This is the first binding on-chain governance decision in Solana's history, setting a precedent for tokenholder-driven protocol changes. The accelerated supply reduction could tighten SOL's supply schedule and is widely expected to be a long-term positive for the token, though it also lowers staking yields. The proposal tracks SIMD-550, authored by engineers at infrastructure firm Helius, and passed with 176.29 million SOL in favor and 66.19 million against across 1,326 votes. Validators also ratified the Solana Constitution (SGP-0001) with 86% support, while rejecting SGP-0003, a Resource and Inclusion Fee that would have burned up to 14 times more SOL daily.
- #08
Kraken Tips Solana's Razor-Thin Inflation Vote
Solana validators narrowly approved SGP-0002, doubling the disinflation rate from 15% to 30%. The proposal passed with 67% support, just 0.33 percentage points above the required two-thirds threshold, after Kraken's validator flipped its vote. This is the first Solana governance proposal passed under the new binding on-chain voting system and it changes SOL's issuance schedule, reducing new SOL creation by roughly 18.9 million tokens over six years. The outcome directly affects SOL holders, stakers, and validators, and highlights the growing influence of large exchanges in network governance. Solana remains inflationary, with terminal inflation still at 1.5% per year; the change only accelerates the timeline to reach that floor from roughly 2032 to 2029. Developers must still re-anchor the supply curve, test, and activate the feature gate. Two companion proposals, SGP-0001 (the Solana Constitution) and SGP-0003 (a fee-burn mechanism), passed and failed respectively.
- #09
Solana Rallies 44% Ahead of First Binding Governance Vote on Inflation and Burns
Solana (SOL) is up more than 8% in the past 24 hours and roughly 44% in August, climbing back above $105, as the network's first binding governance vote concludes on August 23, 2026. The vote will decide whether to adopt a Solana Constitution, double the disinflation rate via SIMD-550, and significantly increase SOL burns via SIMD-553. This is Solana's first binding, stake-weighted governance vote, marking a shift from informal coordination to enforceable on-chain decision-making. The outcome could reshape SOL's supply trajectory, staking rewards, and validator economics, affecting stakeholders across the ecosystem. Voting closes at around 15:30 UTC when epoch 1023 ends, and each of the three SGPs is decided independently by a two-thirds supermajority of participating stake. Nasdaq-listed Solana Company (HSDT) supports the constitution but is voting against both SIMD-550 and SIMD-553 on timing grounds; SIMD-553 already passed code review from client teams Anza and Firedancer on July 20.