Anza Asks Validators to Put 20% of Stake on Agave v4.4.0-rc.1 by Oct 30, Ahead of Solana's Final Rent Cuts

Anza has asked Solana's mainnet validators to put 20% of stake on Agave v4.4.0-rc.1 by the end of Friday, 30 October 2026. The call, posted by Anza on X at 17:51 UTC on 28 October, asks for "volunteers to bring 20% of stake" to the release candidate "per routine upgrade procedure". According to Helius hSOL$125.09+0.5%, Agave v4.4 is the release cycle in which the last three steps of Solana SOL$102.08+1.9%'s SIMD-0437 rent reduction are expected to activate, taking the price of storing data on-chain down 90% from its original level.

None of those three steps has activated yet. A release candidate is a pre-release build that a slice of the network runs before the client is recommended to everyone, and rent on mainnet still sits at step 2 of the five-step schedule.

Agave v4.4.0-rc.1 moves from 10% to 20% of Solana stake

Agave v4.4.0-rc.1 is the first mainnet upgrade candidate of the v4.4 line. Anza tagged it at 21:15 UTC on 26 October, and the GitHub release page labels it a "Mainnet-beta Upgrade Candidate release recommended for 10% adoption", also recommended for testnet and devnet. The 20% call is the next rung on that ladder.

Anza's v4.4 release schedule sets out the rest, with the caveat that "all dates are subject to change":

• 10% stake volunteers: delivered 27 October
• 20-25% stake volunteers: window 26 October to 2 November, call made 28 October
• General adoption recommended for all mainnet validators: targeted for 2 November
• Mainnet feature activation for v4.4 begins: targeted for 9 November

That last line matters most for rent. New protocol behaviour on Solana ships switched off behind feature gates, which are turned on one at a time once enough stake runs software that understands them. So installing rc.1 changes nothing for users by itself. The rc.1 release notes list performance and stability work, including changes to how the client handles unstaked network connections, memory contention fixes and a security patch to the rustls-webpki dependency, and mention no feature gates or SIMDs. One fix in the build has already drawn attention: Marinade links a v4.4 backport to skipped leader slots on Agave 4.3.2.

SIMD-0437 rent reduction: stages 3, 4 and 5

Rent on Solana is the SOL deposit every account must hold to stay on-chain, priced per byte of data. SIMD-0437, written by Igor Durovic of Anza, cuts that price in five steps from the original 6,960 lamports per byte (a lamport is a billionth of a SOL). Its rationale is that the minimum balance "depends on an arbitrary constant set years ago" rather than on what storage costs validators.

Step 1 (6,333 lamports per byte) went live on mainnet on 3 September 2026, as we reported when the first phase began. Step 2 followed at epoch 1033, taking the rate to 5,080 lamports per byte, a 27% effective cut. The remaining three, per the SIMD:

Helius's Agave 4.4 breakdown lists stages 3 to 5 as part of the 4.4 work and says the feature gates are "expected to go live during the Agave 4.4 release cycle", without dates. Anza's Feature Gate Tracker complicates the version story: it lists the step 3 gate, "Set lamports per byte to 2575", under Agave v4.3.0-rc.1 and Firedancer v26.10.0, with a status of "Pending Testnet Activation". Steps 4 and 5 do not appear on the tracker yet. Whichever client line first carried the code, step 3 has not been switched on even on testnet, and no network has a published date for any of the final three.

By our arithmetic from the SIMD's rates, a standard token account (charged for 293 bytes including account overhead) needs about 0.0015 SOL at today's 5,080 lamports per byte and would need about 0.0002 SOL at 696, against roughly 0.002 SOL before the cuts began.

What a cheaper minimum balance means for SOL holders and developers

The cut applies to new accounts automatically. Existing accounts keep their balance unless the holder chooses to withdraw the excess above the new minimum, which the SIMD allows. Helius puts the prize at "over 3 million SOL (~$300m)" redeemable once the rate reaches 696, an estimate it attributes to Ghost. Withdrawing is opt-in, so how much of that SOL actually moves depends on how many account holders choose to withdraw.

Developers gain most from cheaper account creation, and users pay less to open token accounts and interact with apps. Validators carry the other side of the trade: cheaper storage invites more state, which every validator has to hold. SIMD-0437 handles that by giving each step its own feature gate and requiring that core developers "proceed to the next step only if a risk analysis, grounded in existing safeguards and empirical data, indicates that it is safe to do so". It also points to SIMD-0389 as a way to raise rent automatically if state grows too fast, and depends on SIMD-0392, which relaxes a balance check so rent can go back up if needed. Closing an account you no longer need still returns its whole deposit, whatever the rate; the tool that closes empty token accounts does that in bulk.

SIMD-0290, SIMD-0433, SIMD-0317 and SIMD-0599 in the v4.4 cycle

Helius lists four other changes for the 4.4 cycle.

SIMD-0290, by Andrew Fitzgerald and Hanako Mumei of Anza, stops a transaction whose fee payer cannot pay from invalidating the whole block. The transaction stays in the block as a skipped no-op that changes no state but still counts its requested compute against block limits, so a failed payer still uses up the block space it asked for. Validators then no longer need to execute earlier transactions to check a block is valid, which the SIMD calls "one step closer towards asynchronous validation/execution".

SIMD-0433 makes program upgrades resize the program's data account to the new binary. A smaller upgrade refunds the surplus rent and a larger one expands without a separate step, which Helius frames as a nudge towards leaner programs.

SIMD-0317 fixes block propagation to sets of 32 data and 32 recovery pieces (shreds), so a validator can rebuild a set from any 32 of the 64 it receives and checks become simpler. Under SIMD-0599, inactive stake accounts drop out of the stake data used to calculate rewards. The tracker lists all three under Agave v4.4.0-beta.0 and Firedancer v26.10.0, pending testnet activation.

What to watch after Anza's 30 October deadline

The next markers are on Anza's schedule: the general adoption call for v4.4, targeted for 2 November, and the start of v4.4 feature activation on mainnet, targeted for 9 November. Step 3 of the rent cut still has to activate on testnet, and the tracker lists Firedancer v26.10.0 as the Firedancer version for each of these gates, alongside the Agave version. Until the step 3 gate flips on mainnet, Solana stays at 5,080 lamports per byte.