Solana developers are considering a proposal to eliminate block limits once the network's planned Alpenglow upgrade takes effect, a change designed to expand throughput by allowing performance to scale with validator hardware. Filed Friday as SIMD-0370, the proposal would remove Solana's current 60 million compute unit cap per block.
The proposal submitted by the Firedancer development team at Jump Crypto would allow block size to adjust dynamically. Blocks could expand to accommodate as many transactions as the fastest validators can handle, while smaller validators could simply skip voting on blocks exceeding their capacity through a skip-vote mechanism.
Jump Crypto is the digital assets arm of Chicago-based Jump Trading Group. Earlier this month, Jump Crypto provided funding for Forward Industries' $1.65 billion PIPE deal, alongside Galaxy Digital and Multicoin Capital, helping establish a public Solana treasury strategy.
Lifting Solana's block cap could raise throughput by enabling stronger validators to pack in more transactions. However, this approach may tilt rewards toward operators with bigger machines, creating a trade‑off between scaling capacity and maintaining a broad validator set across the network.
The Firedancer team argues that the current incentive structure for validator clients and program developers is broken. According to their proposal, network capacity is determined not by hardware capabilities but by the arbitrary block compute unit limit, constraining potential performance gains.
The change has sparked debate among developers and community members on the GitHub proposal thread. Some warn that removing caps may favor well‑funded operators who can deploy high‑end hardware, potentially squeezing out smaller validators while increasing centralization risks. Others raised concerns that overly large blocks could cause propagation delays or weaken security if too many validators abstain from voting.
Expected later this year, the Alpenglow upgrade already promises to cut block finality from roughly 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds while adding new features. The skip‑vote feature in Alpenglow allows smaller validators to abstain from blocks they cannot process quickly, maintaining consensus even under heavy load conditions.
The Firedancer proposal would build on Alpenglow's foundation by tying Solana's capacity to validator performance rather than protocol‑set ceilings. Validators on Solana are independent operators who run nodes to process transactions and secure the network, earning rewards through staking and transaction fees.