Anza: The Solana core protocol will gradually remove floating-point operations to avoid the risk of consensus divergence

The Solana core client development team Anza announced that it is gradually removing floating-point operations from the Solana core protocol. The first layer, SIMD-0391, was activated in epoch 1026 of the mainnet Beta, replacing floating-point operations in the Stake Program and validator client’s warm-up and cool-down logic with fixed-point operations.

The second layer, SIMD-0607, has been proposed and is under review, targeting the runtime itself to remove floating-point operations in the inflation rewards and rent calculation paths. Anza stated that floating-point operations can produce different rounding results on different hardware, validator clients, and compilers, which may lead to consensus divergence and network activity risks. These two improvements eliminate that risk by standardizing fixed-point operations. Further work will continue to address floating-point operations in other paths.