Solana durable nonces face removal no sooner than May 2027

Draft SIMD-0723, filed Nov. 5, would retire the Solana feature that keeps signed transactions valid indefinitely, with no mainnet switch before May 5, 2027.

The quick take

Price: Solana ($SOL) trades at $86.75, down 3.0% in 24 hours, as of 7:41 a.m. ET.
Trigger: A draft proposal filed on Nov. 5, SIMD-0723, would remove durable nonces from the network.
Watch: Sign-off from Anza and Firedancer engineers, and how custodians plan to replace the feature.

Solana durable nonces may be on their way out. The feature lets a signed transaction stay valid without expiring, and a new draft proposal would retire it. The draft says the switch will not reach mainnet before May 5, 2027.

What happened

The proposal, SIMD-0723, was opened on GitHub on Nov. 5 by Gabe Rodriguez of Anza, the firm behind Solana’s main validator software. After it takes effect, every transaction would need a recent blockhash. A blockhash expires once it is more than 150 blocks old.

The System Program would stop creating, advancing and upgrading nonce accounts. Owners could still withdraw from those accounts and change their authority. The pull request needs approval from at least one Anza engineer and one Firedancer engineer.

Why it moved

The draft lists years of bugs tied to the feature. In 2022, one failed transaction went down both the blockhash path and the nonce path, and mainnet stopped for about 4.5 hours. It also says durable nonces invite spam, because many copies of a payment can be signed against one nonce.

CoinDesk reports that attackers used the feature in the April 1 attack on Drift, a trading protocol that lost at least $270 million. The proposal itself does not mention Drift.

What to watch next

Few senders lean on the feature, but they pay a lot. Researcher Max Resnick counted 16.1 million nonce transactions out of 521 million in one epoch in June, about 3.1%. Those paid about 30% of priority fees, and 555 accounts sent 97.5% of them.

Custodians and exchanges that sign on offline machines are the most exposed. The draft points to Programmatic Signer and Blueshift Vector as replacements. It warns that risk moves to those programs, since a failed submission does not cancel an approval.

Bottom line: Solana wants every transaction to expire quickly, and heavy users of the old feature have at least six months to adapt.