Solana's internal clock just ticked faster. Earlier Friday, the network's target slot time dropped from 300 milliseconds to 250, a nearly 17% speedup in how often the chain produces blocks. A slot is the short window handed to one validator—a computer that helps run the network and gets paid for it—to build and publish a block, which is just a batch of confirmed transactions. Shrink that window, and the whole chain's heartbeat quickens.