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Technical proposal SIMD-0438 Idea

Safeguard for rent-exempt minimum increase

  1. Idea
  2. Draft
  3. Review
  4. Accept
  5. Implement
  6. Active

Decision brief

Why this proposal matters

Protective feature to increase rent-exempt minimum balance back to the legacy value of 6960 per-byte. This should only be activated in response to excessive state growth observed on mainnet beta.

Source-backed reading aid · source language: EN

Proposal at a glance

What changes

  • Protective feature to increase rent-exempt minimum balance back to the legacy value of 6960 per-byte. This should only be activated in response to excessive state growth observed on mainnet beta.

Stakeholder map

Who is affected

Builders & client teams Impact unknown

No proposal-specific evidence was found for this group.

Action requirement unknown
Validators & operators Impact unknown

No proposal-specific evidence was found for this group.

Action requirement unknown
Users & stakers Impact unknown

No proposal-specific evidence was found for this group.

Action requirement unknown
Governance & ecosystem Impact unknown

No proposal-specific evidence was found for this group.

Action requirement unknown

Exact source revision

Full proposal document

Source-language document. Technical identifiers and evidence remain unchanged. 0616093b2952

Summary

Protective feature to increase rent-exempt minimum balance back to the legacy value of 6960 per-byte. This should only be activated in response to excessive state growth observed on mainnet beta.

Motivation

Reducing rent without a built-in safeguard to respond to excessive state growth is inherently risky. This proposal is designed to provide a rent increase feature gate proactively so core developers can respond to issues more promptly.

New Terminology

N/A

Detailed Design

Reset lamports_per_byte_year to the legacy value of 6960.

ACCOUNT_STORAGE_OVERHEAD = 128
lamports_per_byte_year = 6960 // post-activation
exemption_threshold = 1.0
effective_size = ACCOUNT_STORAGE_OVERHEAD + data_size_bytes
min_balance = effective_size 
                            * lamports_per_byte_year
                            * exemption_threshold
                       = effective_size * 6960

Alternatives Considered

SIMD-0389 introduces a supervisory controller that will detect and respond to excessive state growth automatically. Because that alternative is yet to be accepted, the manual intervention described in this proposal can allow for safely shipping moderate rent reduction sooner while further reduction can be withheld until the controller is shipped.

Impact

  • New account creations and allocations will be subject to the increased rent value. SIMD-0392 maintains usability of existing accounts that are made sub-exempt after the rent increase.

Security Considerations

N/A

Backwards Compatibility

SIMD-0392 grandfathers in existing accounts so they will continue to be valid after a rent increase.

Evidence graph

Related proposals and rollout

One or more sources are unavailable.

Upstream review record

Upstream discussion & review

GitHub review is editorial context, not evidence of on-chain support, voting, or outcome.

PR #438 · merged SIMD-0438: Proactive Rent-Increase Safeguard 5 comments and reviews · Mar 16, 2026
@simd-botbot

Hello igor56D(https://github.com/igor56D)! Welcome to the SIMD process. By opening this PR you are affirming that your SIMD has been thoroughly discussed and vetted in the SIMD discussion section(https://github.com/solana-foundation/solana-improvement-documents/discussions/categories/ideas). The SIMD PR section should only be used to submit a final technical specification for review. If your design / idea still needs discussion, please close this PR and create a new discussion here(https://github.com/solana-foundation/solana-improvement-documents/discussions/categories/ideas). This PR requires the following approvals before it can be merged: - At least one approval from a Anza team member: t

GitHub ↗
@simd-botbot

Thanks, bw-solana(https://github.com/bw-solana)! ⚠️ Status: Cannot merge yet - Missing approval from: Firedancer (ptaffet-jump(https://github.com/ptaffet-jump), topointon-jump(https://github.com/topointon-jump), 0x0ece(https://github.com/0x0ece), lidatong(https://github.com/lidatong), or ripatel-fd(https://github.com/ripatel-fd))

GitHub ↗
@simd-botbot

✅ All approvals received! @igor56D, you can now merge this by commenting /merge. ✅ Status: Ready to merge

GitHub ↗
@simd-botbot

✅ Merge successful! igor56D(https://github.com/igor56D)'s PR has been merged.

GitHub ↗

simd.watch community discussion · SIMD-0438

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Provenance

Evidence & technical details

Rollout or chain data, source revisions, freshness and integrity.
2

SIMD

Deployment Status

Document lifecycleIdea
CategoryCore protocol

Feature Gate not yet created

Exact source revision

Sources & integrity

  • Proposal document pinned_commit_blob
    0616093b2952ed6de52c4a27d66aadd11d48d4f9
  • simd-document document · stale · Sep 10, 2026
    0616093b2952ed6de52c4a27d66aadd11d48d4f9

One or more sources are unavailable.