Rent reduction is live on testnet.
Step 1 of SIMD-0437 just activated, the first of five feature gates cutting Solana's storage cost per byte by 90% overall.
End state after all five steps: lamports_per_byte drops 6,960 → 696. A token account's rent-exempt deposit goes from ~$0.16 to ~$0.016.
Cheaper accounts = cheaper deployments.