Solana is preparing to activate its first mainnet upgrade to shorten slot time, according to Brennan Watt, a core Solana developer and CEO of Anza. The change is expected to reduce block production time from about 400 milliseconds to 350 milliseconds, with formal effect beginning at Epoch 1020. Watt said developers should watch for transition issues because some SDK constants, including DEFAULT_MS_PER_SLOT, have not yet been updated to reflect the new setting. An official release with the revised values will be published after the feature is activated. He also said the rollout uses a delayed activation model: the feature enters a pending state in Epoch E, activates in Epoch E+1, and only becomes fully effective in Epoch E+2. Applications that rely on SDK constants matching actual mainnet slot timing may need extra compatibility logic during the transition, such as switching behavior at epoch slot boundaries. Over the longer term, Watt said Solana plans to move these network parameters on-chain so clients can query them directly. He added that most nodes are expected to hit the target of a two-slot delay in most cases, and related limits are set to be loosened further in Anza v4.3.

Solana core developer and Anza CEO Brennan Watt said the network is activating its first slot-time reduction on mainnet, with block production time expected to move from about 400 milliseconds to 350 milliseconds. The change is set to take effect at Epoch 1020. Watt warned developers about a transition period, saying some SDK constants, including DEFAULT_MS_PER_SLOT, have not yet been updated. He said the team will publish a version with the new values after activation and advised applications that rely on SDK timing constants to add fallback logic during the transition. Watt also said Solana plans to move these network parameters on-chain in the long run, so clients can query them directly. For now, the team needs to complete this upgrade first. He said the process resembles Solana’s early days of "difficult but fast iteration," and added that most nodes are expected to hit a two-slot delay target in most cases. Those limits will be relaxed further in Anza v4.3.

The week ahead includes a dense run of crypto policy, exchange and project events. DeepSeek’s revised API pricing takes effect on Aug. 17 with peak and off-peak rates, while Coinbase is scheduled to carry out system maintenance, launch US500 perpetual-style index futures for U.S. users through Coinbase Derivatives, and end support for USDC deposits and withdrawals on Noble. Hashdex is also set to close and liquidate its Bitcoin ETF, and Binance will delist six tokens on the same day. Attention then shifts to regulation. South Korea will implement tighter rules for single-stock leveraged ETF and ETN products on Aug. 19, including stricter deviation-rate controls and an added simulated-trading requirement for first-time retail investors. Politico, citing three people familiar with the matter, reported that the White House may meet crypto and prediction-market executives on Aug. 19. On Aug. 20, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Innovation Advisory Committee will hold its first meeting, with crypto assets, artificial intelligence and prediction-market oversight on the agenda. The week also features several token unlocks, including LayerZero, KAITO, MBG and SOON, plus project updates from Solana, DGrid AI, SNS, Doodles, Step App and Manus. Binance will make additional network and compliance-related changes later in the week, including restrictions involving EXMO and other platforms.

Ethereum is moving away from Poseidon at Layer 1, ending years of work around a hash function long favored in SNARK-based systems. On Aug. 13, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake said on X that the Ethereum Foundation had decided to abandon Poseidon in favor of traditional hash functions such as SHA2 or BLAKE2. The change comes after eight years of research, tens of millions of dollars in spending, and a broader reset of Ethereum’s post-quantum roadmap. The key technical driver is progress in binary-field SNARK design, which allows traditional hash functions to perform inside proving systems at speeds that were previously associated with SNARK-optimized designs. Drake said a laptop can now verify about 1 million conventional hash calls per second in a SNARK setting, while recent benchmarks from projects including Flock and SNARK.fast point to sharply improved throughput. The roadmap itself remains in place. Ethereum still expects a production-grade leanVM in 2027, followed by deployments across the consensus, execution, and data layers in 2028. The Foundation has also expanded its post-quantum work through pq.ethereum.org, weekly interoperability devnets involving more than 10 client teams, and two $1 million research prizes. The shift also comes as Solana and Starknet advance their own post-quantum plans using Falcon and BLAKE2-based transitions.

Anza, the core development team behind the Solana ecosystem, has published the release plan for Agave v4.3, the validator client upgrade that will introduce several notable enhancements. The planned features include the Alpenglow consensus protocol, new system calls for SHA512 and big-integer modular exponentiation, and an increased CPI (cross-program invocation) depth. According to the preliminary schedule, the testnet is expected to begin recommended node upgrades on August 17, followed by feature activation on August 24. On the Beta mainnet, volunteers will be recruited on September 8 to move 10% of staked SOL to v4.3, with an additional 25% targeted on September 14. September 21 is set as the suggested date for full Beta mainnet adoption, and feature activation would start on September 28. The team emphasized that all dates are tentative and subject to change. This staged rollout aims to allow validators and stakeholders to prepare gradually, reducing potential disruption during the upgrade process.

A public dispute over Solana’s perpetual futures market has turned into a broader argument about what a well-funded ecosystem foundation is supposed to do when several teams are chasing the same category. The debate started after Flash.Trade founder Anas Khader said he was shutting down his exchange on Aug. 7 and blamed, in part, what he described as the Solana Foundation’s cold support for a single rival team. Two days later he named Phoenix, claiming it benefited from foundation-linked grants, though he offered no evidence and the foundation has not disclosed recipients or amounts under its perps initiative. The clash quickly widened beyond one protocol. Commentators including Fabiano argued that Phoenix’s fully onchain design captures more activity for Solana itself, making a concentrated push easier to justify if the goal is to build a true rival to Hyperliquid. On Aug. 10, Solana Foundation President Lily Liu rejected the idea of “king making,” saying the right principle is “open meritocracy”: actively enable competition and let the market decide. Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Anza economist Max Resnick then joined the discussion, extending it into a larger question about token value, chain architecture, and how ecosystem resources should be deployed.

Solana remained the top chain by decentralized exchange volume in the second quarter of 2026, but the network’s underlying revenue picture weakened as both trading activity and fee generation fell from earlier highs. In a quarterly report by Galaxy Digital Vice President of Research Lucas Tcheyan, Solana’s DEX volume dropped 45% from the previous quarter even as it held the No. 1 position for a seventh straight quarter. Network fees fell about 44%, while application fees declined 31% to $552 million, with revenue still heavily concentrated in meme-coin activity. At the same time, the report argues that Solana’s larger story is no longer just low-cost, high-throughput execution. The chain is trying to reposition itself as infrastructure for tokenized equities, stablecoins, lending, and other forms of on-chain finance. That shift showed up most clearly in real-world assets. Solana’s RWA value crossed $3 billion in June for the first time, tokenized stocks became the largest single RWA category on the chain, and Solana handled more than 95% of all tokenized equity trading during the quarter. The report says the key question for the second half of 2026 is whether that tokenized asset base can be turned into durable borrowing demand, collateral usage, trading activity, and fee income. In other words, the issue is no longer whether Solana can support these assets technically. It is whether the network can convert new issuance and distribution into lasting economic value.

Max Resnick, chief economist at Anza, used the run-up to voting on Solana proposals SIMD 550 and SIMD 553 to examine a broader question: how the problems those proposals are trying to address connect to Layer 1 valuation. He said the piece was not meant as a direct commentary on either proposal and noted that he had already posted his views under the relevant GitHub discussions. Instead, he focused on what should count in a coherent valuation framework for L1 tokens. Resnick argued that transaction activity, developer growth, or narratives around tokens as money, collateral, or "digital oil" do not by themselves explain token value unless they translate into residual value for token holders. In his framework, L1 value accrues mainly through fee burns, which are economically similar to buybacks, and fee distributions to stakers, which resemble dividends. By contrast, staking rewards funded by inflation are not protocol revenue, nor a real external cost, but a transfer through dilution. He also separated revenue, costs, and total supply as distinct accounting categories, warned that inconsistent treatment can distort L1 profitability analysis, and argued that raising fees does not automatically lift revenue. The outcome depends on demand elasticity and on whether fee design can better match users’ willingness to pay.