Solana's SIMD-0370 Plan: Unlocking Validator Performance or Opening the Door to Centralization?

Jump Crypto’s latest proposal threatens to reshape Solana’s validator economics—removing the fixed compute cap could turbocharge network throughput, but at what cost to decentralization?

Solana’s developer community is buzzing about SIMD-0370, a technical proposal that would ditch the rigid 60 million compute unit ceiling and let block sizes expand based on what individual validators can actually handle. Sounds good in theory—faster blocks, more transactions, happier users. But the tradeoffs are messier than they appear.

The Core Problem: One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Right now, Solana operates under a hard cap: every block is limited to 60 million compute units, period. Whether you’re running on a $50k server farm or a modest setup, the block size stays the same. This creates inefficiency—top-tier validators are artificially throttled, while the network leaves performance on the table.

SIMD-0370 flips the script entirely. Instead of a global ceiling, each validator would be able to process blocks tailored to its capacity. A validator running Jump Crypto’s Firedancer client (the high-performance alternative to the standard Solana Labs client) could theoretically handle massive, complex blocks. A validator with older hardware? It could skip those heavy blocks and process simpler ones instead.

How the “Performance Flywheel” Actually Works

Here’s where it gets interesting—and controversial. Under this model:

• Block producers pack more transactions into blocks for validators that can handle them, collecting higher fees in the process
• Smaller validators lose fee revenue when they skip heavy blocks, creating economic pressure to upgrade their infrastructure
• Hardware requirements gradually creep higher, forcing a constant cycle of upgrades to stay competitive

Jump Crypto designed this incentive structure deliberately. They see it as elegantly solving Solana’s throughput ceiling while the Alpenglow upgrade tackles finality (cutting it from ~12.8 seconds down to 150 milliseconds).

On paper? It’s a performance miracle. Combined with Firedancer deployment, SIMD-0370 could unleash substantially higher transaction throughput and faster block confirmation times.

The Centralization Elephant in the Room

But engineers like Akhilesh Singhania aren’t buying the rosy outlook. They’re warning that this creates a two-tier validator economy:

The haves: Well-funded validators who can afford continuous hardware upgrades. They process complex blocks, collect premium fees, and stay competitive.

The have-nots: Smaller operators and community validators who face a grinding choice—shell out for expensive upgrades or gradually get priced out by skipping high-fee blocks.

If this dynamic plays out over time, Solana could see validator consolidation around a handful of well-capitalized players. That’s the exact opposite of what the network claims to want as it diversifies away from reliance on a single client.

Earlier Attempts and Why SIMD-0370 is Different

Earlier in 2024, Jito Labs CEO Lucas Bruder proposed SIMD-0286, which would simply raise the fixed cap from 60 million to 100 million compute units. It’s a simpler, more conservative change—but SIMD-0370 advocates argue it’s just kicking the can down the road.

By removing the cap entirely and making it dynamic, SIMD-0370 eliminates the need for future hard decisions about global limits. The tradeoff is that you’re essentially outsourcing network performance to whoever can afford the best hardware.

The Timeline and What’s Coming Next

Alpenglow is expected to hit testnet in December 2025 after passing a near-unanimous on-chain vote. SIMD-0370 would come after that deployment, once the finality improvements are proven stable.

Current SOL price sits at $139.31, with the network’s performance upgrades being closely watched by traders and validators alike. The stakes for these technical decisions are high—both for network resilience and for validator profitability.

Can Smaller Validators Survive This?

Maybe, but it’s not a level playing field. Smaller operators could theoretically:

• Focus on optimizing their software stack to squeeze more efficiency from existing hardware
• Adopt lighter-weight client alternatives where available
• Specialize in serving specific transaction types rather than competing for all blocks

But realistically? Without continuous hardware investment, smaller validators will gradually see their fee revenue compressed as producers send increasingly complex blocks to high-capacity nodes.

The Real Question: Performance vs. Decentralization

SIMD-0370 forces Solana to choose. You can have blazing-fast throughput with Firedancer and dynamic block sizing—but you might have to accept a more concentrated validator set to get it. Or you can prioritize validator diversity and accept that performance gains will be more modest.

The community’s next move will reveal which value it actually cares about.