Solana's 90% Rent Cut: The Economics of SIMD-0437

Every account on Solana carries a refundable SOL deposit — and the network just cut the price of that deposit by 90%.

SIMD-0437, shipping with Agave 4.2, is being covered as "Solana gets cheaper". That is true, and it matters for anyone creating accounts at scale. But the more interesting consequence runs the other way: because the change is strictly a relaxation, every account funded at the old rate keeps every lamport it was funded with. The SOL already locked across millions of forgotten token accounts just became a fixed, non-replenishing inventory — worth ten times more per account than anything created after activation.

Here is what rent actually is, exactly what SIMD-0437 changes, and what the cut means for reclaims, airdrops, ZK compression, and mint costs — verified against the proposal text rather than the headlines.

Rent Is a Refundable Deposit, Not a Fee

Solana charges for on-chain storage by requiring every account to hold a minimum SOL balance — the rent-exempt minimum — proportional to the account's size. Under the long-standing rate of 6,960 lamports per byte, a standard token account (ATA) requires a deposit of roughly 0.002 SOL.

The deposit is not spent. Close the account, and the lamports return to whatever address you designate. The catch is that nothing closes accounts automatically: sell a token to zero and its empty ATA stays open — holding its deposit — indefinitely. One memecoin season commonly leaves a wallet with 50–200 dead token accounts. Tens of millions of empty accounts have already been closed by people who noticed; far more are still sitting open.

SIMD-0437: 90% Off, in Five Feature-Gated Steps

SIMD-0437 lowers lamports_per_byte from 6,960 to 696 — not in one jump, but in five independently feature-gated reductions. It ships with Agave 4.2, whose mainnet feature activations began rolling out in late August 2026.

Current rate — 6,960 lamports / byte

Steps 1–4 — 6,333 → 5,080 → 2,575 → 1,322

Step 5 — final rate — 696 lamports / byte (−90%)

At the final rate, opening a token account costs about 0.0002 SOL instead of about 0.002 SOL. For anything that creates accounts in bulk, the math shifts by an order of magnitude: an airdrop to 10,000 fresh wallets used to immobilize roughly 20 SOL in recipient account rent; the same drop will soon immobilize about 2 SOL.

The Asymmetry Nobody Prices In: Old Accounts Keep Their Old Deposit

The detail buried in the proposal text: SIMD-0437 is strictly a relaxation of existing constraints. Accounts are allowed to hold less, never forced down to the new minimum. And CloseAccount returns the account's actual lamport balance — whatever was deposited at creation time — not the current rent minimum.

Consequence: every token account created before activation still returns ~0.002 SOL on close — forever. Every account created after full activation returns ~0.0002 SOL. The reclaimable stock sitting on-chain today is a finite inventory that stops replenishing. It does not expire — but it never grows again, and the accounts only get easier to forget.

Where that inventory hides, in rough order of how often people are surprised:

Empty token accounts. Every token sold (or rugged) to zero left one behind at ~0.002 SOL. Active wallets routinely hold 0.1–0.4 SOL in dead ATAs.

Failed program deploy buffers. An interrupted solana program deploy strands a buffer account holding rent for the entire binary — often 1–5 SOL per failed attempt. Developers lose more here than traders do in token accounts.

Wrapped SOL accounts. wSOL left over from DEX interactions is both a balance and a rent deposit, and unwraps back to plain SOL.

None of this requires trusting a third party with keys. Closing an account is a standard instruction your own wallet signs, with the refund directed to an address you choose.

Second-Order Effects for Builders

Two knock-on effects are worth re-running your numbers for:

ZK compression loses most of its rent argument. Compressed accounts' rent advantage falls from roughly 400× to roughly 40×. Still decisive for six-figure recipient lists; no longer decisive for a 500-wallet drop. If compression was on your roadmap purely for rent savings, the math has changed underneath it.

Fixed protocol fees become the dominant cost. With storage nearly free, per-mint costs are increasingly whatever the protocol on top charges — Metaplex's 0.0015 SOL fee becomes the largest line item of a Core NFT mint, not the rent beneath it.

A Cheaper Chain, and a Closing Window

The rent cut is unambiguously good for Solana: cheaper onboarding, cheaper airdrops, cheaper mints. But it also quietly finalizes a ledger: the SOL locked under the old rate is the most valuable per-account reclaim the network will ever offer, and every account created from here on is worth a tenth as much to close.

— Find Out What Your Wallets Are Holding —

See the exact total before you sign anything.

I built a scanner for exactly this: it lists every empty token account, wSOL balance, and stranded deploy buffer in a wallet, and shows the exact SOL total you would get back — before you approve a single transaction.

Scan Your Wallet ↗ Unwrap Wrapped SOL Recover Failed Deploys

Sources: the SIMD-0437 proposal and Helius's Agave 4.2 overview.