Solana Founder Reveals Vision Behind Expanding SOL’s Block Capacity

Solana cofounder Anatoly Yakovenko has recently issued a tweet that has reignited interest in the SOL blockchain’s performance capabilities. Yakovenko wrote: “Doubling block capacity is easier than BLS vote aggregation economics.”

The BLS signature mentioned by the Solana cofounder is employed by the Ethereum beacon chain protocol, which uses the BLS12-381 elliptic curve. BLS signatures may be aggregated, making the entire beacon chain consensus mechanism practical.

Yakovenko’s comment came as the SIMD-0256 proposal, which aimed to increase Solana’s block limit, was officially activated on the mainnet, increasing the network’s block capacity from 48 million to 60 million Compute Units (CUs). The SIMD 0256 proposal changes the Max Block Units limit to boost capacity for nonvote transactions.

The fundamental goal of block limits is to ensure that the vast majority of network users can keep up with the network by limiting the amount of work a leader can pack into a single block.

SIMD-0256 represents a modest increase in block space. Solana intends to aggressively increase the block limit, or Max Block Units (the maximum number of CUs that can be included in a block), to 100 million CUs to provide additional network capacity.

An increase to 100 million CUs would imply a doubling of the block limit (from an initial 50 million CUs), as indicated by the Solana cofounder.

Solana hits new TPS milestone

In another tweet, the Solana founder wrote: “I think Solana added more capacity than Ethereum and all of its L2s combined,” in response to the recent milestone of Solana True TPS hitting 1,700 transactions per second.

The activation of SIMD 0256 increased capacity to 60 million CUs, allowing Solana to process around 1,700 transactions per second during daytime demand.

At press time, SOL was down 7.53% in the last 24 hours to $186, having previously surpassed the $200 mark for the first time since June 6, coinciding with a surge in crowd interest as Solana saw a two-month rise in development activity.