Solana Foundation Vice President of Technology Jacob Creech outlined a near-term 2026 infrastructure sequence that includes the first rent-reduction stage in the week beginning August 31, Transaction V1 activation on September 9, further slot-time cuts, an Alpenglow consensus upgrade targeted for October and the Scale or Die event in November. Transaction V1 will raise Solana’s maximum serialized transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes, about 3.3 times the current limit, so larger workloads such as zero-knowledge proofs, complex multisignature instructions, BLS signatures and cross-chain operations can fit in a single atomic transaction. The format is opt-in: legacy and version-zero transactions remain valid, developers must adopt V1 explicitly, and V1 does not support address lookup tables, while wallets and APIs must handle larger payloads. Creech stressed that rent, transaction-size, slot-time and Alpenglow changes use separate feature gates, so the September 9 launch will not automatically shorten slots or enable Alpenglow. Rent is planned in five stages from 6,960 lamports per byte to 696 lamports per byte, a 90% cut in rent-exempt deposits that lock SOL for onchain accounts. Slot targets have been moving from 400 milliseconds through 350, 300, 250 and eventually 200 milliseconds on independent activations, and Alpenglow remains aimed at roughly 150-millisecond finality in October pending testing and validator support.