Solana transactions just got more than 3 times bigger, narrowing the gap with Ethereum

Programmable blockchain Solana has more than tripled the amount of data that can fit inside a transaction, giving developers room for more complex trades, company-wallet approvals and privacy applications.

The network's new Transaction V1 format went live Tuesday at approximately 01:00 UTC, according to the Solana Foundation. It raises the maximum amount of data a single transaction can carry to 4,096 bytes from 1,232 bytes.

This upgrade aims to address a major structural bottleneck and help the network narrow the gap with rival platforms like Ethereum.

While Solana has always offered superior speed and lower costs than Ethereum, its transactions were previously throttled by a strict 1,232-byte hard cap. That's the max amount of data that can go in with a single Solana transaction. Ethereum faced no such constraint, allowing developers to run data-dense applications in a single operation by simply paying higher gas fees.

By tripling the limit to 4,096 bytes, Solana is looking to narrow that gap significantly. Even so, Ethereum maintains a structural edge: it avoids rigid protocol-level size limits entirely, using a flexible block gas limit that accommodates massive operations as long as users cover the transaction costs.

Solana’s new extra space holds instructions, signatures and other information needed to execute a transaction. The change concerns how much each transaction can carry, rather than how many transactions Solana processes per second.

The old limit forced developers to squeeze operations into a small digital package or split them across several transactions.

That became restrictive for company wallets where several people may need to approve a payment, as well as for zero-knowledge proofs, which let applications verify information without revealing the underlying data. Both are among the use cases identified in the upgrade's design proposal.

Read More: Solana to triple transaction size as apps get room for more complex trades

Why larger transactions help

Larger transactions also let developers put more steps into a single all-or-nothing operation. If one step fails, the entire transaction can be rolled back. Developers previously worked around the size limit by bundling several transactions together. Still, the proposal says those bundles do not carry the same network-level guarantee that every step succeeds or fails together.

Apps and services that read Solana data now need to support the new format.

Services that feed blockchain data to wallets, trading apps and analytics platforms must be able to recognize V1 transactions. Otherwise, a request for an individual transaction can fail.

A request for an entire block can also fail if that block contains even one V1 transaction, the Foundation warns.

As such, these are compatibility warnings, not evidence of a widespread outage.

Older transaction formats remain supported. An app can keep sending transactions in the old formats, but it still needs updating to read the new ones.

05:22 UTC: Updates the title to say Solana has narrowed the gap with Ethereum. Adds a line on the Ethereum model in the 5th para.