Solana is considering a new way to preserve offline transaction approvals after proposing the retirement of durable nonces, a feature used by cold-storage signers to approve transactions for later broadcast. The proposed system would keep the cold key’s authorization role but move control of affected accounts to program-derived addresses, creating a new migration and custody process for exchanges, custodians and treasury operators.
According to CryptoSlate, the Solana Foundation has not set a removal date and has not selected a final replacement. Durable nonces will remain available while the network evaluates two designs: Anza’s Programmatic Signer and Blueshift’s Vector. The Foundation has described an approximately six-month migration period, but only after a replacement is audited, ready for use and operating on mainnet.
Why durable nonces are being reconsidered
A standard Solana transaction uses a recent blockhash, which eventually expires. Durable nonces address that timing issue by allowing an offline signer to approve a transaction using a stored nonce, so approval and network broadcast do not have to occur at the same time.
That capability is particularly relevant to cold-storage arrangements, where a private key is kept offline and a separate online operator submits approved activity and pays the network fee. Solana’s recent move toward 200-millisecond slots makes the ordinary approval window shorter in wall-clock terms, although the proposal to replace durable nonces concerns the underlying signing architecture rather than the slot upgrade itself.
The Foundation’s proposed approach would insert a signer program between the cold key’s approval and transaction execution. A program-derived address, or PDA, would control the relevant assets or permissions. The PDA does not have a private key; instead, the signer program would verify that the original cold key approved the action before allowing it to proceed.
This changes more than the software used to sign. Operators would need to migrate assets and authorities to the new derived addresses, while applications would need to accept transactions arriving through the signer program. Risk and custody teams would also need to review the replacement signing path.
Two designs, different execution controls
Under Programmatic Signer, the cold key signs an authorization message rather than the exact network transaction eventually submitted. A relayer can place that approval inside a fresh-blockhash transaction. The signed authorization binds important elements such as the executor, nonce account and embedded execution message, but the relayer can choose the outer fee payer and blockhash and add instructions around the approved action.
Vector takes a stricter approach to the surrounding transaction. Its approval covers the top-level instruction buffer, including the data and accounts used to pass approved actions into other programs. Instructions before or after the approved actions must already be included when the cold key signs them.
In both designs, the relayer’s role is to submit an authorized action, not to rewrite it. However, a failed submission does not necessarily make the approval unusable. Both proposals allow a failed action to remain executable later if the relevant nonce has not advanced.
That makes deadlines and revocation important operational controls. A signed timeout can reject execution after a specified deadline. Separately, an authorized nonce advance can revoke an approval. A transaction that fails because of a deadline may not consume the nonce when the state changes roll back, so operators must account for how failed attempts affect later execution.
Migration and application compatibility
The migration would take place at the account and permission level rather than through one universal wallet switch. Operators may need to move native SOL, transfer token balances to accounts controlled by the PDA, or move mint and freeze permissions. For staked assets, staker authority, withdrawal authority or both may need to be transferred, depending on the intended control structure.
The two proposals also differ in how native SOL is handled. Programmatic Signer uses a System-owned derived SOL account that can send SOL through an approved ordinary transfer. Vector uses a program-owned account and releases SOL through an authorized withdrawal or closing operation.
Application compatibility is a separate question from cryptographic validity. The signer program would generally deliver approved actions through cross-program invocation, in which one program calls another. Some applications may reject actions that do not arrive as direct top-level instructions, while checks that inspect only top-level instructions may fail to identify activity nested inside the signer program.
The source material points to Token-2022’s CPI Guard as an example of why compatibility must be assessed for each account and permission. Rules may restrict transfers, burns, approvals or ownership changes through cross-program calls, although specific delegate-based routes can exist. As a result, each application and custody setup would need its own review.
Readiness and current market picture
Programmatic Signer documentation reports a devnet deployment and audits in progress, with remediation required before a version-one release or any mainnet deployment. Some simulation, relay and migration functions are still marked as unfinished, while Vector publishes implementation code and program IDs without stating an audit or mainnet deployment status in its README.
Existing workflows will also need to be considered. Fireblocks’ current protocol onboarding material describes automatic durable-nonce injection for selected WalletConnect integrations, with a default provider-managed validity period of 15 minutes.
Moneyiar market data at 10:09 on October 13, 2026, showed Solana (SOL) at $107.0732692017, down 3.99% over 24 hours and 10.4% over seven days. Gram (previously Toncoin), or GRAM, was $1.3778719921, down 2.9% in 24 hours and 11.83% over seven days. Request (REQ) stood at $0.0530094444, down 3.49% over 24 hours and 5.85% over seven days. WOULD was $0.0351412837, up 0.33% over 24 hours and 10.6% over seven days, according to Moneyiar data.
For Solana users relying on offline approvals, the central issue is therefore not an immediate shutdown of durable nonces. It is whether an audited, production-ready replacement can preserve cold-key controls while giving operators and applications a workable path to migrate assets, authorities and execution policies.
