Solana starts phased 90% storage cost cut for token accounts

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Solana’s core development team, Anza, announced that the first of a total of five feature gates has gone live. The development will result in a 90% reduction in on-chain storage costs. The changes will be beneficial mainly for stablecoin and payment businesses, which have become one of the network’s fastest-growing use cases.

For developers forming token accounts in large quantities and the users they onboard, this change now brings a lower fixed capital cost, which had remained the same for years.

The timing is very important. Over the past year, Solana has been working to make itself known as a settlement rail and not only a means of speculation. However, rent remains one of the obstacles that are standing on their way of achieving the defined goal of mass account creation. Cheaper accounts make it more feasible for fintech companies and wallets to pay for the deposits of their users.

Solana begins phased cut to token account costs

SIMD-0437, a proposal written by Igor Durovic from Anza, is in charge of the reform. It lowers a constant called lamports_per_byte, which establishes the minimum balance an account has to maintain from 6,960 to 696.

As stated on the upgrade page of the Solana Foundation, this constant was established many years ago and has remained unchanged ever since. Instead of mirroring the actual cost of storage incurred by the validators, the price for storage automatically increased along with the value of SOL.

The reduction phase will take place across a total of five gates: first from 6,960 to 6,333, and then from 6,333 to 5,080, followed by 2,575, 1,322 and finally 696. The testnet activation takes place at the first gate, amounting to a reduction of approximately 9%.

The subsequent gates will have to be activated separately depending on the information on state growth made available by the team of core developers.

Why the deposit math matters for payments

Rent on Solana is not a fee. The Foundation describes it as a fully refundable bond that is returned when an account is closed. What SIMD-0437 changes is the size of that upfront deposit.

Previously, the rent-exempt amount to be deposited in the case of a standard SPL token account used to equal $0.159, but after the launch of all five gates, it will only become $0.0159, which is ten times less than that.

At a larger scale, the savings become significant. According to estimates made by the Foundation, if a payments company had to set up one million token accounts, it would cost $159,000 today, and $15,900 after the entire reduction had taken place. This amount can make or break a business in terms of whether or not it can afford to pay for account creation for large numbers of users.

Cryptopolitan has reported that payment volume on Solana rose by 755.3% in 2025, establishing the network as a settlement layer for stablecoins issued by brands such as Western Union, PayPal, and Fiserv. Reduced rent deposits translate directly into that development as they lower the cost of onboarding each new payment user onto the chain.

The safeguards built in against state bloat

The phased approach is designed to limit the risk that cheaper storage causes a surge in on-chain state, which every validator must store and index.

A sixth feature gate can restore the constant to 6,960 if problems emerge. A companion proposal, SIMD-0392, also allows rent to be raised again later without disrupting existing accounts.

The reduction is backed by published analysis from Solana Foundation data researcher Umberto Natale. His modeling found that even after a tenfold cut, a state-bloat attack designed to exhaust current storage headroom would still require roughly $17.2 million in locked capital. He concluded that the 90% reduction does not pose a systemic risk to the cluster.

Where does the rollout go from here

The rent reduction ships with Agave 4.2, Anza’s validator release recommended for mainnet in August 2026. The release also includes larger 4,096-byte transactions and slot times cut in half to 200 milliseconds.

According to the Foundation, mainnet feature activations for the release began the week of August 17. Existing accounts continue working unchanged and can simply reduce their balances to the new minimum.

The next milestone is straightforward: each of the four remaining gates must clear its risk review before Solana’s full 90% rent reduction reaches mainnet.

The 90% figure refers to the fully completed rollout, not an immediate 90% cut. Each feature gate is independent, allowing Solana developers to monitor state growth before proceeding to the next reduction. The Foundation also describes a sixth fallback gate that can restore the original 6,960 value if problems emerge.

The Solana Foundation’s own example uses $0.159 per standard SPL token account, falling to $0.0159 after the full 10× reduction. For 1 million accounts, that translates to $159,000 → $15,900.

This is a refundable rent-exempt deposit, not a transaction fee. The SOL remains locked while the account exists and can be recovered when the account is closed.

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