Rent came down, and every account is now over-funded

Rent on Solana is a deposit, not a fee: an account holds a minimum balance to stay alive, and gets it back when it closes. Lower the minimum and nothing breaks — but every account that was funded under the old rule is now carrying more SOL than it needs, and nobody is going to hand it back on their own.

What changed

The Foundation's own framing: rent “is getting cheaper, and that means you and your users are now sitting on excess lamports that can be reclaimed.” This is the first phase of a five-phase rent reduction roll-out, so the same surplus will appear again, four more times.

How you get it out

The Token Program gained a WithdrawExcessLamports instruction. It “recovers SOL sitting above the rent-exempt minimum from a token account, mint, or multisig account — without touching token balances and without closing the account.” The program computes the source account's rent-exempt floor and moves everything above it to a destination you name.

It requires authorisation from the account's authority: the owner for a token account, the mint authority or the mint itself for a mint.

Why this is worth an afternoon

Individually the amounts are small. In aggregate they are not: a protocol holding tens of thousands of token accounts has a real balance sheet line sitting in rent-exempt floors that no longer exist. The accounts that matter most are the ones you opened on behalf of users, because that surplus is theirs and they have no way to know it is there.

The part not yet published

The announcement does not name the SIMD or the feature gate that carried the change, nor the old and new lamports-per-byte rates, nor the dates of the remaining four phases. We are not filling those in.