Solana's core development team, Anza, has announced the launch of the first of five planned features aimed at reducing data storage costs on the blockchain. Taken together, the changes will cut the associated costs by ninety percent, which will be particularly beneficial for companies working with stablecoins and payment systems — one of the fastest-growing use cases for the network. For creators of large numbers of token accounts and the users they onboard, the reform means lower fixed capital expenditures that had remained unchanged for many years.
The technical foundation of the reform is proposal SIMD-0437, prepared by Igor Durovich of Anza. The document calls for reducing the lamports_per_byte constant, which determines the minimum account balance, from 6960 to 696 units. According to the Solana Foundation, this coefficient was set many years ago and has not been revised since, and its value did not reflect the actual storage costs incurred by validators. The reduction will occur in five stages: first the figure will drop to 6333, then to 5080, 2575, 1322, and finally to 696. Activation on the testnet corresponds to the first step, with a reduction of approximately nine percent, while each subsequent stage will require a separate decision based on system development data. It is important to understand that rent in Solana is not a fee: the foundation describes it as a fully refundable deposit that is released when an account is closed. After all five stages are complete, the deposit amount for a standard SPL token account will fall from $0.159 to $0.0159 — a tenfold decrease. At the scale of a payments business, the savings become significant: creating one million token accounts will cost a company $15,900 instead of the current $159,000, which could prove critical to the viability of a business model.
The timing of the reform carries strategic significance. Over the past year, Solana has consistently established itself as settlement infrastructure for payments, not just a venue for speculative activity. Payment transaction volume on the network grew by 755.3 percent in 2025, enabling it to become the settlement layer for stablecoins issued by brands such as Western Union, PayPal, and Fiserv. Cheaper accounts reduce the cost of onboarding each new payment system user and allow fintech companies to more efficiently serve customer deposits.
The phased approach is designed to limit the risk of a sharp increase in the volume of data that each validator is required to store and index. In the event of problems, a sixth feature gate is in place that can return the constant to its original value of 6960, and an accompanying proposal, SIMD-0392, allows rent to be raised again if necessary without disrupting the operation of existing accounts. The safety of the reform is confirmed by an analysis from Umberto Natale of the Solana Foundation: his modeling showed that even after a tenfold reduction, an attack aimed at exhausting storage capacity would require approximately $17.2 million in locked capital, meaning the reduction does not pose a systemic risk to the cluster.
The rent reduction is included in the Agave 4.2 validator release from Anza, recommended for mainnet launch in August 2026. The update also includes an increase in transaction size to 4096 bytes and a halving of slot times to 200 milliseconds. Feature activation on mainnet began during the week of August 17, with existing accounts continuing to operate without changes and simply able to reduce their balance to the new minimum level. Each of the four remaining stages will undergo independent risk review before the full ninety-percent reduction becomes available on mainnet, and the fallback sixth stage will retain the ability to revert to the original value should unforeseen issues arise.