Solana trims account deposit 9%, owners can reclaim excess SOL

Solana activated the first stage of a five-step plan to lower the minimum SOL held against account storage on Sept. 3. The network reduced the lamports-per-byte parameter from 6,960 to 6,333 at epoch 1028. Eligible token-account owners can now reclaim SOL that exceeds the new required minimum.

The Solana Foundation published a reclamation guide that describes an instruction, WithdrawExcessLamports, which moves SOL above the required minimum without closing a token account. The Token-2022 program supports the same instruction. For token accounts, the account owner must authorize a withdrawal. For mint accounts, authorization comes from the mint authority or from the mint account itself if the authority has been revoked. Custom program-owned accounts require the owning program to implement withdrawal logic and checks.

A standard associated token account stores 165 data bytes plus 128 bytes of overhead, making an effective 293 bytes under the rent formula. Applying the lamports-per-byte rates to one million identical standard token accounts provides an illustrative example: at 6,960 lamports per byte the required reserve would be about 2,039.28 SOL; after the first reduction to 6,333 lamports per byte the reserve drops to roughly 1,855.57 SOL, freeing about 183.71 SOL. If the plan reaches its conditional final target of 696 lamports per byte, the reserve for the same one million accounts would fall to about 203.93 SOL, a reduction of about 1,835.35 SOL compared with the original rate.

Those figures are calculated minimums for a fixed account population and do not measure actual withdrawals or the broader on-chain supply. The final target implies that persistent rent-bearing storage would need to grow by about ten times to keep the same aggregate minimum reserve as before the reductions.

Immediate effects include the ability for accounts that hold more than the new minimum to have the excess reclaimed if the party controlling withdrawal authority authorizes it. Businesses opening new accounts will need less SOL up front to meet the deposit requirement. Whether a payments provider or custodian can reclaim capital depends on contract terms and which party retains the account’s withdrawal authority.

Reclaiming excess SOL moves existing balances between accounts; it does not create new tokens. The Solana Foundation’s materials do not provide an aggregate measure of completed withdrawals or how reclaimed SOL has been redeployed. Reclaimed balances could be staked, used to open more accounts, or sold, but the foundation’s guide does not quantify any of those outcomes.

Solana’s fee and staking mechanics remain separate demand channels for SOL. Under current rules, transactions burn half the base fee and send the other half and any priority fees to validators. Token holders can also delegate stake to validators to earn rewards.

The network’s second planned reduction, to 5,080 lamports per byte, was on testnet in early September and was expected on mainnet in mid-September. The remaining reductions are scheduled to arrive with the Agave 4.4 release in November. Each activation will be gated by reviews of persistent state growth, and the network can revert to the original parameter if reviews indicate it is necessary.

Evaluations of the policy’s effects will need to track persistent account bytes and associated minimum reserves rather than raw counts of account-creation events. A Solana Foundation researcher reported that in a sampled cohort 75.5% of account-creation events closed within the same transaction, indicating that high creation activity can produce little persistent on-chain state. How many accounts remain open, who holds withdrawal authority, and how reclaimed SOL is used will determine the practical outcome of the reductions.