Solana’s target slot time fell from 300 milliseconds to 250 milliseconds at epoch 1037 on Sept. 18, 2026, marking the third speed increase since August and the third stage of the four-stage SIMD-0525 plan. Early monitoring found slots landing at about 266 milliseconds over a 60-minute sample, with roughly 0.05% of scheduled slots skipped. A draft proposal would reduce the target to 200 milliseconds and lower per-slot compute capacity from 62.5 million to 50 million compute units, while keeping the network-wide ceiling near 250 million compute units per second. The four-slot leader window would shrink from one second to 800 milliseconds, increasing the importance of geographic proximity, transaction forwarding and client interoperability. The 200-millisecond change has no confirmed activation date and depends on sustained network performance, including skip rates, handoffs and client behavior. An August routing failure at TeraSwitch also highlighted infrastructure concentration, making 28.83% of network stake unreachable for about 33 minutes, although blocks continued landing.