Anza said Solana’s 250ms slot-time feature gate is pending activation on mainnet-beta and is scheduled to go live at the epoch 1037 boundary at approximately 05:01 UTC on Friday, September 18. The rollout is the third stage of Solana’s SIMD-0525 plan to reduce slot times from 400ms to 200ms, leaving one final step toward the network’s target after the 350ms and 300ms reductions already activated on mainnet. The 250ms setting follows the protocol’s one-epoch activation delay, with epoch 1035 marked pending and epoch 1036 carrying the feature as active before epoch 1037 enforcement. The change will reduce maximum block compute units to 37.5 million from 45 million, lower the writable-account compute cap to 15 million from 18 million, and cut hashes per tick to 39,062 from 46,875. Epochs will last about 30 hours at 250ms, while the 150-block blockhash window will shrink to roughly 37.5 seconds. Anza has urged mainnet-beta validators to bring 25% of stake to Agave v4.3 by September 18. The final 200ms stage is active on devnet and testnet, but its mainnet timing remains undecided. Shorter slots are intended to improve confirmation speeds and support tighter market-maker spreads, while the 200ms target would produce twice as many blocks per day as the original 400ms setting.