Solana’s Anza CEO discusses potential 200ms slots and Agave v4.2 upgrade

Solana’s current slot times sit at roughly 400 milliseconds. Anza, the engineering firm behind the network’s Agave validator client, wants to cut that number in half.

Anza CEO Brennan Watt has been discussing plans for 200-millisecond slot times as part of the upcoming Agave v4.2 upgrade, which he describes as a major client-level overhaul.

What 200ms slots actually mean

Think of a slot like a metronome tick for the blockchain. Every tick, the network has a chance to produce a new block. The faster the tick, the faster transactions get processed and confirmed.

At 400ms per slot, Solana already processes blocks significantly faster than most competitors. Ethereum, for context, operates on 12-second slots. Cutting Solana’s slot time to 200ms would make the network’s rhythm twice as fast, meaning transactions could theoretically be included in blocks and begin confirmation in half the current time.

The performance push doesn’t stop at slot times. Anza has already demonstrated what aggressive optimization looks like at the infrastructure level. Turbine retransmit latency was improved from roughly 600ms down to approximately 0.8ms using XDP (Express Data Path) enhancements.

Agave v4.2 and the road from v4.0

Agave v4.0 launched into mainnet-beta in May 2026. The Agave client itself is a fork of the original Solana Labs software, developed independently by Anza as part of Solana’s broader push toward client diversity.

Watt, who took over as CEO of Anza in January 2026, has been steering the firm toward these ambitious performance targets since his arrival.

Anza isn’t working in isolation on the speed front. The Alpenglow consensus initiative targets approximately 150-millisecond finality. Alpenglow also aims to remove on-chain vote transactions, which currently consume a significant portion of Solana’s block space. Every time a validator votes to confirm a block, that vote is itself a transaction that takes up network capacity.

What this means for investors

The removal of on-chain vote transactions through Alpenglow deserves particular attention from anyone watching Solana’s economics. Vote transactions currently inflate Solana’s transaction counts, which has been a persistent criticism from skeptics who argue the network’s headline throughput numbers are misleading. Removing them would simultaneously make the network more efficient and its metrics more honest.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.