Solana Latest Roadmap Interpretation: How to Build an Internet Capital Market?

Author: @0x_Todd

Original link:

Statement: This article is reprinted content. Readers can obtain more information through the original link. If the author has any objections to the reprint format, please contact us, and we will modify it according to the author's request. Reprinting is for information sharing only and does not constitute any investment advice, nor does it represent Wu's opinions or positions.

Yesterday, Solana announced a new roadmap.

Essentially, due to the various chain improvements having entered deep waters, there is indeed a situation where some terms are piled up. I will attempt to interpret Solana's latest roadmap in a way that everyone can understand, along with my own analysis. First of all, Solana underwent a significant narrative shift at the end of 2024, with its goal transforming into establishing an "Internet capital market," whereas previously, Solana's objective was to build a high-performance blockchain. The internet capital market, as the name suggests, is aimed at creating a borderless, around-the-clock financial market where various assets—such as stocks, bonds, currencies, and real-world assets (RWA)—are tokenized and traded seamlessly on the chain. This thing is equivalent to a general program, similar to the "Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation". In order to achieve this general program, task breakdown is necessary. This time, the Solana roadmap, to be precise, is the roadmap of the technical department, which aims to help the concept of "Internet capital market" take root. Therefore, you do not see the efforts of Solana's business and compliance sectors.

You can understand it as the technical roadmap of Solana technology. The Solana technology team not only includes the core developers from Solana Labs but also several important roles, such as: Six main authors of the original roadmap

1. Anza, a brother-level entity. This is a low-profile Solana development company founded by former members of the Solana Labs team. Personally, I think its role is similar to that of ConsenSys/Ethereum, or Blockstream/Bitcoin.
2. Jito, level two brother. This is the Solana version of Lido, but it has more power than Lido because Jito also holds the control over almost all MEV on Solana.
3. Multicoin, which is at least at the level of the third brother. Although it belongs to capital, it holds a lot of SOL and projects in the SOL ecosystem, so it definitely has a say in the technical field.
4. DoubleZero, this belongs to the younger brother level, focusing on speeding up the internet.
5. Drift, also considered a junior level, is a perpetual contract, but it also participates in some functionality development of Solana. A major official from Solana Labs, along with these three big guns and two small warriors, forms a six-person team for this roadmap. It is essentially equivalent to the real Solana Technology Reform Committee, abbreviated as the Reform Committee hu, ah no, let's not abbreviate it, just joking.

Next, let's take a look at what efforts the Solana technology department needs to make in order to achieve the "Internet Capital Market"? The internet capital market is more of a slogan because it doesn't specify how everyone should proceed. Therefore, to facilitate developers in working together, the technical department translated the entire slogan into technical language, which is "Application-Controlled Execution (ACE)." The difficulty has already started here. What exactly is this cumbersome Application Control Execution (ACE)?

Solana believes that for an internet financial market (especially alongside Web2), it must meet one condition: financial applications must have millisecond-level control over the ordering of their own transactions. Note: It is necessary to have sorting rights, millisecond-level precision, and control rights. Therefore, in order to achieve Application Controlled Execution (ACE), Solana's technology still lacks a lot of things. To find out what is missing, please refer to the roadmap.

Short-term goals (1-3 months): Make the order book more user-friendly, suppress malicious MEV traps, and reduce transaction latency.

Mid-term goals (March to September): Reduce latency through dedicated fiber optic networks; make significant changes to the Solana consensus algorithm to greatly shorten transaction finalization time; reduce transaction latency.

Long-term goals (9-30 months): Transition the Solana consensus algorithm from a single leader to multiple leaders to enhance the system's resilience against extreme risks and censorship, providing applications with greater ordering rights.

Next, let's talk about how to achieve short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals respectively.

Short-term goals (1-3 months): Make the order book more user-friendly, suppress malicious MEV traps, and reduce trading latency.

The person in charge is Jito and Anza.

First is the order book. Solana really loves order books. I remember during the SBF era, Solana wanted to promote the order book model DEX. And today, tools like Jito and Drift are developing a tool called BAM, which is a new way to build trades. I will discuss the specific details in a later post.

BAM framework led by Jito

Here, but you just need to know that in this way, the order book can operate more smoothly without relying on traditional DEX models similar to Uniswap, and in the future, an order book comparable to that of CEX can be created. After all, how can a blockchain be considered an internet financial market without an order book?

Suppressing malicious MEV clips has become a routine for Jito. Of course, this is also part of further strengthening Jito's power, as all blocks must go through Jito and the entire BAM to be built, akin to the Grand Secretaries of the Ming Dynasty. Anza has contributed a new TPU client to reduce transaction sending delays.

Mid-term goals (March to September): Reduce latency through dedicated fiber optic networks; significantly revise the Solana consensus algorithm to greatly shorten the transaction finalization time; reduce transaction latency.

The persons in charge are: DoubleZero and Anza.

As we all know, the main reason for the slowdown of Solana nodes is insufficient bandwidth. The project mentioned earlier, DoubleZero, aims to increase the available bandwidth for ordinary Solana validators multiple times by establishing dedicated fiber optic networks.

Image source: DoubleZero

Of course, there are not only DoubleZero focusing on bandwidth issues now, but also protocols like Optimum. The difference is that DoubleZero essentially sells hardware, while Optimum essentially sells better algorithms.

In addition, we should focus on discussing the issues with the Solana consensus algorithm. However, due to limited space, I can only briefly mention it here. Let's continue to dig into this topic and open a separate post to discuss it later.

The Solana consensus algorithm, as is well known, is Proof of History (PoH) + Tower BFT. The essence of this consensus is that it first creates an internal clock through Proof of History, and then selects a leader each time according to time. The leader is responsible for block production, while other nodes are only responsible for voting, which is known as single leadership.

The benefit of a single leadership is speed, but the downside is its singularity, which is why Solana has also experienced several outages. I believe everyone who has worked in a company knows the difference in efficiency between having a single leader and having a group of leaders; there's no need to elaborate on this. Of course, Solana itself believes that the main issue with a single leadership system is that the final confirmation time is not fast enough. Currently, Solana requires 12.8 seconds for final confirmation, while its competitor, for example, Sui only takes 0.5 seconds.

The so-called final confirmation has been mentioned many times before. Before the final confirmation, there is a possibility of rollback in the blockchain *theoretically*; however, after the final confirmation, not even the King of Heaven can change a bit, which is what makes the blockchain immutable. A more intuitive example is when you deposit in an exchange, the time you wait for several blocks to be credited is a precaution taken by the exchange to prevent blockchain rollback.

Although in 99.9% of cases, blockchain will not crash due to insufficient final confirmation time, there have indeed been historical cases where this happened, such as when someone used ETC or BTC fork coins to scam exchanges. However, do you remember that Solana aims to create an internet capital market—financial markets have extremely high requirements for finality, leaving no room for error. Therefore, 12.8 seconds is not enough, and Solana is determined to develop a new consensus mechanism.

It is important to know that the consensus mechanism is the foundation and soul of a blockchain. The heavy responsibility of development has been entrusted to Anza, so now you understand why I refer to Anza as the big brother of Solana's technology faction.

Although Anza is not officially part of the army, it is definitely a regular force.

The glory of the Alps, image source: danbaileyphoto

Solana's new consensus mechanism is called Alpenglow, which means "the glow of the Alps," symbolizing the Swiss origins of the protocol.

The consensus mechanism of the Alps can be summarized simply as having three characteristics:

(1) Final confirmation reduced to 150 milliseconds (3x faster than competitors)

(2) No need to vote again (off-chain signatures, saving costs for small nodes)

(3) More elegant (eliminate technical debt, prepare for multiple leadership)

Under the new consensus in the Alps, there is still a single leader, but:

1. Transmission layer: Relay nodes have been introduced to help forward transactions, significantly reducing delays.

2. Voting Layer: Although the fault tolerance is reduced from 33% to 20%, resulting in a slight sacrifice in security, the time to reach final confirmation is greatly shortened. In addition, cryptography is used to ensure that the voting is done off-chain.

New propagation layer. Image source: Helius

New voting layer. Image source: Helius

In this way, the final confirmation time is successfully shortened to 150 milliseconds.

Finally, the long-term goal (9-30 months): to change Solana's consensus algorithm from a single leader to multiple leaders, in order to increase the system's resistance to extreme risks and censorship, and to give applications greater ordering rights.

This is also easy to understand, as the goal is to establish a free "internet capital market", so it assumes the worst-case scenario. What is the worst-case scenario? For example, a single leader wants to censor transactions, a single leader wants to prioritize transactions (instead of allowing the application to prioritize them by itself).

Why is Solana so persistent about letting financial applications sort themselves? Let me give you an example, and you'll understand. Suppose you are trading stocks through a broker, and unexpectedly, China Telecom takes advantage of its network base stations to intervene in your trades. Can you accept that? Right? MEV is actually very unreasonable; it's just that everyone has gotten used to it. How can the power of the chain and nodes override that of the applications?

Therefore, in order to avoid this worst-case scenario, Solana must introduce a multi-leadership model in the future. This way, if one leader node acts maliciously, including but not limited to censoring transactions such as addresses sanctioned by the United States; ordering transactions such as personally creating traps, other leaders must be able to counteract it.

Multi-leadership model. Image source: Anza

This piece is relatively short because there is currently no clear path to achieve it, and it is still in the ideal situation of discussion.

So, you see that the short-medium-long term technical goals, from the simplest way of block sorting, to the later complex consensus mechanism improvements, to finally adding the extremely difficult multi-leadership model, are essentially progressive, serving the ultimate goal of "Internet Capital Market."

I hope my analysis of the Solana roadmap can bring you some inspiration and thoughts. I kindly ask the family members who have persisted to read this to help by liking and sharing. I also hope that the technical improvements of Solana go smoothly. As a member of the Solana Chinese content Sonar Fam, I hope to contribute a little to the technical iteration of Solana.

In the end, although Solana's technical roadmap is filled with a lot of jargon and abbreviations, after analysis, its technical route is undoubtedly effective and feasible. We also look forward to the day when traditional financial applications truly take root and land on Solana!