Timeline
- 7.0
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.
- 7.0
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.
- 7.5
Solana Activates Transaction V1, Tripling Data Capacity Ahead of 250ms Slots
Solana activated its new Transaction V1 format on Sept. 15, raising the maximum serialized transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes — more than a threefold increase — while the Anza-developed Agave client moves the network's slot time from 300ms to 250ms, expected to take effect around 05:01 UTC on Sept. 18 when epoch 1037 begins. Both changes land as the network handles record transaction volumes and rising activity across stablecoins, apps, and tokenized equities. The combination of larger transactions and shorter slots expands both what developers can build in a single atomic transaction and how quickly the network responds, strengthening Solana's position in the high-throughput layer-1 race against Ethereum and other chains. It also raises the operational bar for validators, wallets, and exchanges, since tighter slot windows demand more reliable block production and propagation, and services must be able to parse the new format as adoption grows. V1 is introduced through SIMD-0385, can reference up to 64 accounts directly, moves compute-unit limits and fee information inside the transaction message rather than separate instructions, and removes Address Lookup Tables; legacy and v0 transactions still work, so migration is optional. The upgrade does not by itself make transactions faster or cheaper, and shorter slots do not automatically double capacity because the work allowed per slot is adjusted as slot times shrink.