Solana has begun phasing in a 90% reduction in on-chain storage costs under the SIMD-0437 proposal, with the first of five feature gates now live. The change cuts the lamports_per_byte constant from 6,960 to a final target of 696 lamports per byte, lowering the rent-exempt deposit required to maintain token accounts.
According to Anza and the Solana Foundation, the rollout will proceed in five independently gated steps: 6,960 to 6,333 (9%), then to 5,080 (27%), 2,575 (63%), 1,322 (81%), and finally 696 (90%). The initial testnet activation applies the first step, while subsequent gates will be activated separately after developers review state growth. The full 90% reduction is the completed rollout, not an immediate cut. A sixth fallback gate can restore the original 6,960 value if problems emerge, and companion proposal SIMD-0392 allows rent to be raised later without disrupting existing accounts.
The economic impact is significant for token account creation. The Solana Foundation estimates a standard SPL token account rent-exempt deposit would fall from $0.159 to $0.0159. For one million token accounts, that means capital requirements drop from $159,000 to $15,900, saving $143,100. Solana describes rent as a refundable bond returned when an account is closed, so cheaper accounts lower the fixed capital cost for developers and payment providers onboarding large numbers of users.
The timing aligns with Solana's push into stablecoin payments. Cryptopolitan reported that payment volume on Solana rose by 755.3% in 2025, with stablecoin issuers such as Western Union, PayPal, and Fiserv using the network. Solana Foundation data researcher Umberto Natale's modeling found that even after a tenfold cut, a state-bloat attack designed to exhaust current storage headroom would require roughly $17.2 million in locked capital, concluding the reduction does not pose a systemic risk. The rent reduction ships with the Agave 4.2 validator release, which also includes larger 4,096-byte transactions and slot times cut in half to 200 milliseconds.
