Solana's Path to Decentralized Nasdaq: ANZA's Vision for Internet Capital Markets

The cryptocurrency industry has long promised to revolutionize traditional finance, but few blockchains have articulated a concrete path to actually displacing legacy infrastructure like Nasdaq. In a comprehensive discussion on the Lightspeed podcast, Max Resnick, lead economist at ANZA—the core development team behind Solana—laid out an ambitious vision for how Solana intends to become the world's premier venue for price discovery and trading. The conversation revealed not only significant technical progress on major protocol upgrades but also a fundamental rethinking of market structure that challenges long-held assumptions about how decentralized exchanges should operate.

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Resnick, who joined ANZA at the end of 2024 after spending years in Ethereum's research ecosystem, brought a unique perspective shaped by his experience as both an economist and MEV specialist. His candid assessment of Solana's strengths, weaknesses, and the concrete steps being taken to address fundamental challenges offers a window into how the network's builders are thinking about the future of decentralized finance.

What Is ANZA?

ANZA represents the concentrated engineering firepower dedicated exclusively to improving Solana's core infrastructure. The organization formed approximately eighteen months ago when developers who built the original Solana Labs client made a strategic decision to split off into a separate entity focused solely on protocol-level development. This separation was designed to eliminate distractions and allow the team to maintain laser focus on making the Solana client and network operate as efficiently as possible.

The team consists primarily of engineers who have been working on Solana for four or more years, having weathered every challenge the network has faced since its inception. Resnick described ANZA's culture as a "dirty jobs" approach—a willingness to roll up sleeves and tackle complex problems head-on, regardless of whether they fall neatly within any individual's area of expertise. This generalist mentality, combined with deep domain expertise, has enabled the team to make surprising progress on ambitious upgrades.

Resnick's role as lead economist encompasses both direct application of his expertise in economics and game theory—such as designing reward structures for the new consensus mechanism—and broader involvement in areas like transaction landing and scheduler optimization, where his MEV background proves invaluable. The position reflects ANZA's recognition that building a blockchain capable of competing with traditional financial infrastructure requires not just excellent engineering but also sophisticated economic design.

Alpenglow Progress and Timeline

The most significant revelation from the discussion concerns Alpenglow, Solana's forthcoming consensus upgrade that promises to dramatically improve the network's performance characteristics. Resnick expressed genuine surprise at how quickly development has progressed since initial discussions began in January 2025. What he initially assumed would be a multi-year project has advanced far more rapidly than anticipated.

By April 1st, 2025, ANZA had its first internal devnet running the new consensus mechanism fully integrated with Agave—not merely a skeleton prototype but a complete system. Since then, the team has developed an even faster iteration of the consensus mechanism that is now also running on internal devnet with full Agave integration. This represents remarkable progress for such a fundamental change to the network's architecture.

"The timeline that we're looking at right now is we're really hoping to be on Solana testnet by December, hopefully by Breakpoint, which is in December and Abu Dhabi," Resnick revealed. "And then we're hoping if everything goes well, then we'll be launching early next year."

This timeline positions Alpenglow for mainnet deployment in early 2026, which would represent an extraordinarily rapid development cycle for such a significant protocol change. The speed of progress reflects both the maturity of Solana's development processes and the accumulated expertise of the team.

The Maturing of Solana's Codebase

Understanding Solana's current position requires appreciating the context of its origins. When Solana launched in 2020, it wasn't because venture capitalists were demanding deployment—the team was simply running out of money. They had to ship what they had, duct tape and all, to survive. This origin story explains many of the technical debt issues that have plagued the network over the years.

Today, however, Solana's codebase shows clear signs of maturation. Resnick pointed to several concrete improvements that indicate the network has moved beyond constant firefighting into more strategic, forward-looking development. The network now enforces compute unit limits on blocks—a seemingly obvious requirement that wasn't implemented during the initial rush to launch. The team is implementing explicit transaction headers and block headers, changes that improve readability, debugging, and future development but which simply cannot be prioritized when everything is on fire.

The current development approach involves what ANZA calls "performance audits," where specialized engineers examine specific sections of code from first principles, profile what's actually happening, and completely redesign those components for dramatically higher throughput than currently needed. This methodology aims to eliminate the need to repeatedly revisit the same code sections—a pattern that was common in earlier years and significantly slowed progress.

Recent performance work on Turbine, Solana's data dissemination protocol, exemplifies this approach. By fundamentally redesigning this mission-critical component rather than applying incremental fixes, the team has reached a point where they don't anticipate needing to revisit it for firefighting purposes. This maturation enables ANZA to pursue major initiatives like asynchronous execution and other architectural improvements that require stable foundations.

The Case Against Central Limit Order Books

Perhaps the most provocative argument Resnick advanced concerns the fundamental market structure of decentralized exchanges. Solana was originally conceived with the explicit goal of building a blockchain fast enough to support on-chain order books—the same market structure that has dominated traditional finance for decades. The original Serum DEX, developed with close connections to FTX, represented the first major attempt to realize this vision.

Yet Resnick argues that the relentless focus on building better central limit order books (CLOBs) may be fundamentally misguided. "What if you're fooling yourself into thinking in terms of central limit order books?" he asked. "There's no reason that for 30 years or whatever, we've had this exact same market structure just with people getting faster and faster and faster. Now, all of a sudden, we've found this thing that's really, really close to that. That's optimal? I don't think so."

The core issue is that CLOBs on blockchains create significant adverse selection problems for market makers. When prices change suddenly, there's a race between market makers trying to cancel their stale quotes and traders trying to execute against them. Centralized exchange data shows market makers win this race only about 13% of the time, and on Solana, the situation appears even worse due to how schedulers prioritize transactions.

This adverse selection forces market makers to quote wider spreads to protect themselves from consistently losing money to informed traders. Wider spreads mean worse prices for users—directly undermining the goal of making Solana a premier trading venue.

The Rise of Proprietary AMMs

Rather than CLOBs, the tightest spreads on Solana currently come from what Resnick initially called "dark AMMs" but suggested should be renamed "proprietary AMMs" to avoid negative connotations associated with traditional dark pools. These protocols, including ones like Solfi (recently revealed to be operated by Ellipsis Labs, creators of Phoenix), Obric, and ZeroFi, have developed sophisticated approaches to market making that often beat even centralized exchange prices.

The key insight is that these proprietary AMMs have figured out how to cheaply bring new price information on-chain, reducing their exposure to adverse selection. Traditional AMMs like Uniswap's x*y=k model have zero new information coming in except through adverse selection trades hitting them—meaning they pay the maximum possible price for new information. Proprietary AMMs use oracles that update quickly or active management strategies to stay current with market prices at lower cost.

These systems also benefit from design choices that favor market makers within Solana's current architecture. Take orders tend to be expensive in terms of compute units requested, while cancel orders are cheap. Since Solana's schedulers prioritize by priority fee per compute unit, a cheap cancel order can achieve higher priority than an expensive take order for the same total fee paid. This creates an implicit advantage for market makers that helps offset some of the adverse selection they face.

"At some points, even tighter than Binance on the same pair," Resnick noted of these proprietary AMMs. "My guess is, if we can take those insights, which are currently being used on spot, just like trading spot BTC, spot SOL, and we start to move them into other derivatives like perps and stuff, I think they'll perform really well there too."

Why Multiple Concurrent Leaders Matter

While proprietary AMMs represent innovations that work within Solana's current architecture, Resnick emphasized that protocol-level changes are still necessary to fully realize the network's potential. The most important upcoming change is multiple concurrent leaders (MCP), which fundamentally alters the transaction inclusion game.

Currently, a single leader has complete control over two aspects of transaction handling: ordering (which transactions go first) and inclusion (which transactions appear at all). The ordering problem can actually be solved without protocol changes—validators could simply sort incoming transactions by priority fee before execution, enforcing a deterministic ordering regardless of how the leader arranged them.

The inclusion problem, however, requires protocol intervention. With a single leader, if you want to submit a cancel order and the leader chooses not to include it, you have no recourse. This creates opportunities for strategic non-inclusion that disadvantages market makers. With multiple concurrent leaders, if one leader refuses to include your transaction, you can submit to another leader who will include it.

"It's a repeated game," Resnick explained. "If somebody's not giving you good quality of service in this period, in the next periods, you're not going to send to them."

This competitive dynamic between leaders creates incentives for reliable, fair transaction inclusion. Combined with application-specific ordering rules—like prioritizing cancel orders similar to what HyperLiquid does—multiple concurrent leaders could dramatically improve market making conditions on Solana.

The Path to Disrupting Traditional Finance

Resnick articulated a clear hierarchy of goals for Solana's financial market development. First, achieve tight spreads. Second, build deep liquidity. Third, become the best place to trade for users worldwide. Only then—not before—attempt to become the default venue for price discovery. "You don't put the cart before the horse and try to become a price discovery venue right away."

The key competitive advantage crypto offers isn't necessarily better market structure but rather permissionless innovation. Traditional finance, Resnick argued, has been "frozen in a block of ice" by regulatory constraints. When CBOE attempted to implement asymmetric maker-taker advantages in 2019—a change that would have improved market structure—the SEC rejected it as "unfair" largely because takers who stood to lose lobbied against it.

"What we're trying to do on Solana is make it so that that is not an issue," Resnick explained. "The SEC is not going to tell you what not to do. It's permissionless innovation. The tech is suitable and flexible enough that you can do what you want to do on here. Nobody's getting in your way, not the tech and not the SEC."

This framing positions Solana not as a direct replacement for existing market structures but as an experimental sandbox where developers can discover better approaches without regulatory permission. If those experiments succeed, they could eventually pull liquidity away from traditional venues that cannot adapt as quickly.

Honest Assessment of Current Limitations

One of the most refreshing aspects of the discussion was Resnick's willingness to openly acknowledge current problems. "That's one of the differences between Solana and everywhere else," he observed. "We're not focused on what should we say to minimize the Twitter foot. We're focused on solving the problem because we're not fighting ETH. We're not fighting Aptos or Sui. We're fighting Nasdaq."

The target is much more ambitious than simply being the best blockchain—it's building infrastructure that can compete with and eventually displace traditional financial markets. This goal demands honesty about shortcomings because hiding problems doesn't make them go away; it just delays their resolution.

"Imagine if during congestion, everybody on Solana was like, 'Oh, there's no congestion,'" Resnick noted. The network's culture of acknowledging and addressing problems head-on is part of what gives Resnick confidence in its long-term success. There are "no sacred cows"—even foundational assumptions like CLOBs being the optimal market structure can be questioned if evidence suggests better alternatives exist.

The MEV Situation on Solana

MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) represents one of the most significant challenges for any blockchain attempting to support fair trading. Resnick provided detailed insight into how sandwiching—a particularly toxic form of MEV where an attacker trades before and after a victim's transaction to profit at their expense—operates on Solana and why the situation has been improving.

Previously, transaction landing was unreliable enough that users had to spray their transactions to many validators in hopes that one would include them. This meant malicious validators who represented only a small percentage of the network could see nearly all transactions. A validator running a sandwiching operation might have only 10% of stake but could see 90% of transactions and extract value from them.

As landing reliability has improved, the "leader forward window" has shrunk from three or four validators to one or two, with hopes of reaching zero. This means sandwichers see far fewer transactions, dramatically reducing their ability to extract value.

"You look at sandwiching rates way down," Resnick reported, crediting ghost.xyz for providing crucial open-source intelligence on Solana's MEV landscape—what he called the "black jungle" due to its extreme opacity compared to Ethereum's "dark forest."

An important nuance is that even when sandwiching does occur, the dynamics on Solana differ significantly from Ethereum. On ETH, transactions in the mempool are visible to many sandwichers who compete in auctions, driving tips high—with proceeds flowing to validators via MEV-Boost. On Solana, because only about 10% of stake runs sandwiching operations, the probability that multiple sandwichers see the same transaction is low. This means sandwich tips remain low and don't flow to validators, so they don't show up in standard REV metrics at all.

"On ETH, it's so socially accepted to sandwich. Nobody even talks about it on ETH. Everybody's sandwiching on ETH. Everybody rents PBS to sandwiching on ETH," Resnick observed. "On Solana, only 10% of the network is sandwiching. We just happen to have way more volume. It looks worse, but the problem is actually much better contained on Solana than on ETH."

Rethinking How Blockchains Should Generate Revenue

The discussion touched on an important debate about how to value blockchains and what constitutes healthy revenue. Resnick advocated for a model where the vast majority of blockchain revenue comes from simple per-transaction fees rather than MEV extraction.

"The healthiest way for the chain to make money is to charge per transaction," he argued. "I want us to be 1 million TPS, 0.2 cents per transaction or something like that, and that's $60 billion a year. And we don't have to rake any traders based on their trade size."

This vision stands in contrast to current metrics that emphasize REV (Real Economic Value), which includes MEV alongside tips and fees. Resnick's concern is that MEV-based revenue is inherently extractive—it comes from users getting worse execution—and thus not sustainable if alternatives exist.

"Anything where you're paying a percentage of your trade size is going to lower overall activity on the chain," he explained. The long-term goal is to increase efficiency until users pay minimal fees for maximum throughput, similar to how competition has driven trading fees toward zero in traditional finance.

The Perpetuals Opportunity

While Solana's spot DEX ecosystem has developed sophisticated solutions through proprietary AMMs, the perpetuals market remains less mature. Resnick identified this as a significant near-term opportunity: "I'd love to see us get really competitive on perps and win that market over HyperLiquid if we really put our heads down."

HyperLiquid has emerged as a major competitor in the crypto perpetuals space, but Resnick questioned whether its success stems from optimal market structure or simply from network effects and execution. "There's a lot of other things that make HyperLiquid successful. All I'm saying is, I don't think that the market structure today is going to be the thing that gets in the way of competing with HyperLiquid because we already see in the data on spot there's great things going on."

Multiple teams are actively working on this opportunity. Drift has been developing improved perpetuals protocols, and Resnick mentioned that Ergonia, a prominent on-chain trader, recently announced plans to incubate perps-focused projects. The insights that have enabled proprietary AM Ms to quote tight spreads on spot markets should translate well to derivatives once someone applies them there.

The Inflation Debate Continues

Earlier in 2025, Solana faced a contentious governance debate about reducing inflation through a market-based mechanism. Despite receiving 62% support from voters (with 75% of stake participating—50% more turnout than any previous Solana vote), the proposal failed to reach the 66% threshold required for passage.

Resnick remains convinced that inflation should decrease, framing the issue in terms of unnecessary costs. Current inflation creates what he calls a "leaky bucket" where significant value flows to external parties—most notably the US government, which he estimates collects $200-400 million annually in taxes from Solana staking rewards.

The taxation issue arises from accounting treatment of newly minted tokens distributed to stakers. Even though holders who stake maintain the same percentage of total supply (since inflation dilutes non-stakers), tax authorities treat the nominal increase in token holdings as taxable income. This creates a pure deadweight loss that benefits neither the network nor its participants.

"We're paying ourselves and the government is saying you're paying yourself. Like, we're creating new Solana tokens. That's the mechanism. You create some new tokens and you give them to people who already hold the tokens. And somehow the US government steps in because you're doing that and says like, through some accounting wizardry, you've done this. Now we want our cut."

Resnick also addressed concerns that a market-based inflation mechanism would increase volatility in validator returns. He argued the opposite is true: "If a shock happens in REV, Trump launches another coin and all of a sudden REV goes way up, everybody wants to stake. But REV brings the staking rewards up and everybody coming into stake brings the actual returns to staking down because the inflation goes down. So it's actually a shock absorber, not a shock amplifier."

Future proposals will likely be more gradual, perhaps with a two-year rollout, and will wait for improved governance infrastructure that allows stakers to vote directly rather than being bound by their validator's vote.

Understanding Real Versus Nominal Yield

A fundamental economic concept underlying the inflation debate is the distinction between real and nominal yields. Nominal staking yield on Solana currently stands at 7-8% APY, but this figure is misleading because it doesn't account for dilution from inflation.

Resnick illustrated with a thought experiment: "Suppose all of the SOL was staked and we made 5% new SOL every year and we distribute it to all the stakers. Now you have more SOL in your balance but the fraction of the SOL supply that you have is the same."

This is analogous to a currency rebase—if everyone's bank balance doubled but prices also doubled, no one would be wealthier. The real yield from staking comes only from fees and tips that represent actual value creation, not from inflationary rewards that simply maintain a staker's proportional share of the network.

For non-stakers, inflation represents a continuous dilution of their holdings. This creates pressure to stake even when the real yield is minimal, which may not be optimal for network health or user experience.

Solana's Development Culture

Throughout the conversation, Resnick emphasized cultural elements that he believes give Solana an advantage over competitors. The willingness to acknowledge problems publicly, question fundamental assumptions, and focus on building the best product rather than managing narratives emerged as recurring themes.

"It was a little bit contentious last time and I'm not sure it needed to be," he reflected on the inflation vote. "Solana wins—we just have some disagreements about the math or whatever." This orientation toward collective success rather than factional conflict enables more productive discussions about technical tradeoffs.

The focus on competing with Nasdaq rather than other blockchains also shapes development priorities. When your benchmark is traditional financial infrastructure rather than other crypto projects, the criteria for success change dramatically. Features that might be sufficient to beat other blockchains may be wholly inadequate for institutional adoption or mainstream financial use cases.

Transparency Challenges in Solana's MEV Landscape

While praising Solana's culture of openness about problems, Resnick acknowledged that the network's MEV landscape remains extremely opaque. He described it as a "black jungle"—even more difficult to analyze than Ethereum's "dark forest" because Solana generates far more data with far less public analysis.

"There is zero transparency in any way. The ghost guys have been doing a ton of great work illuminating this," Resnick said, highlighting ghost.xyz as one of very few groups providing open-source intelligence on Solana MEV dynamics.

This opacity cuts both ways. On one hand, it makes it difficult for researchers and users to understand what's happening. On the other hand, it means that innovations and games develop faster because participants don't immediately share strategies. Resnick speculated that developments currently happening in private will likely become publicly significant in about a year, mirroring the delayed emergence of the proprietary AMM phenomenon.

The Long-Term Vision

When asked to identify the single most important change Solana needs, Resnick gave a two-part answer reflecting different time horizons.

In the short term, the priority is competing effectively in perpetuals markets. The infrastructure and insights already exist—proprietary AMMs have demonstrated tight spreads are achievable, and the protocol supports sophisticated DeFi applications. What's needed is for teams to apply these lessons to derivatives.

"I think we have the tools and the distribution to win it over HyperLiquid if we really put our heads down," Resnick assessed.

In the long term, multiple concurrent leaders represents the most critical change. "That's what I've been talking about for years and I'm working on it. It's a big project, but we're making a surprising amount of progress. I'm much more optimistic than when I was in this podcast six months ago about the timeline."

The combination of near-term application-layer innovation and long-term protocol improvements positions Solana for sustained competitive advantage. Each reinforces the other: better protocol primitives enable more sophisticated applications, which in turn justify continued investment in protocol development.

The Samurai's Gun

Perhaps the most memorable analogy Resnick offered concerned the importance of abandoning outdated tools when better alternatives exist: "Imagine a samurai was like, 'I refuse to use a gun because this sword is what I've been training for my whole life.' It's like, no, the gun is better than the sword. You should use the gun."

This pragmatic orientation—valuing outcomes over methods—explains ANZA's willingness to question whether CLOBs make sense for blockchain markets despite Solana's original design around supporting them. The goal is liquid markets with tight spreads, not any particular market structure for its own sake.

The same pragmatism applies to governance, tokenomics, and protocol design more broadly. Every assumption is subject to empirical validation, and nothing is protected from revision if better approaches emerge.

Application-Specific Sequencing

One underappreciated capability that Resnick highlighted is the potential for applications to implement their own ordering rules within Solana's architecture. While the protocol gives leaders control over transaction ordering, applications can specify how transactions should be sorted during execution.

For example, a DEX could implement a rule that sorts all cancel orders before take orders, similar to HyperLiquid's approach. This is "perfectly legal" and "does not break consensus in any way"—validators simply sort the block according to specified rules before replaying it.

The limitation is that ordering rules alone don't solve the inclusion problem. A leader who sees that an application prioritizes cancels might simply refuse to include cancel transactions at all, profiting from the resulting adverse selection. This is why multiple concurrent leaders remains essential: it ensures that transactions excluded by one leader can be included by another.

Once both ordering and inclusion are addressed through application-specific sequencing rules and multiple concurrent leaders, applications will have "all the tools" they need to innovate on market structure without being constrained by protocol-level decisions.

Smart Contract Completeness Isn't Enough

Resnick offered an important insight about what's actually required for DeFi innovation: "We say smart contracts are Turing complete, but you don't get to control your ordering. It's in fact not enough to do what you need to do to innovate on market structure."

The theoretical capability to execute any computation doesn't translate to practical ability to build competitive financial markets if fundamental parameters like transaction ordering remain outside application control. True programmability requires control over all relevant dimensions, not just computation.

This perspective helps explain why DeFi on Ethereum, despite years of development, hasn't achieved the market structure innovations Resnick envisions. Block times of 12 seconds, PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation) dynamics, and high costs all create constraints that theoretical Turing completeness cannot overcome.

Solana's lower latency and cheaper transactions provide a better foundation, but the remaining constraints around ordering and inclusion still limit what's achievable. The roadmap Resnick outlined—multiple concurrent leaders plus application-specific sequencing—aims to remove these remaining barriers.

Regulatory Arbitrage as Competitive Advantage

An intriguing thread throughout the conversation concerned the role of regulatory constraints in traditional finance. Resnick argued that innovative market structures have been blocked not because they're technically impossible but because regulators respond to lobbying by incumbent participants who would be harmed by changes.

Crypto's permissionless nature offers an escape from this dynamic. Developers can experiment with market structures that would never receive regulatory approval in traditional contexts—not because they're fraudulent or harmful, but simply because they would redistribute value from established players to others.

If these experiments succeed in producing better outcomes for users, they create competitive pressure that eventually forces traditional venues to adapt or lose relevance. This is a different theory of disruption than simply being faster or cheaper—it's about using regulatory arbitrage to pioneer innovations that incumbents cannot easily adopt.

Institutional Participation and Sandwiching

Resnick pointed out that many large Solana validators are publicly traded companies or regulated institutions that cannot engage in sandwiching regardless of profitability. Galaxy, as a publicly traded company, exemplifies validators who face reputational and potentially legal constraints against extractive MEV strategies.

"It's not like Galaxy, which is a publicly traded company, wants to be sandwiching on the blockchain. They can't do that. It's not worth it for them," Resnick observed.

This institutional presence creates natural limits on the extent of sandwiching that can occur, even without explicit protocol mechanisms to prevent it. The same regulated entities that operate on Ethereum but rent out block building to sandwichers via MEV-Boost are constrained on Solana by the lack of equivalent infrastructure that would distance them from the extraction.

As institutional participation in Solana grows, the percentage of stake operated by entities with reputational constraints also grows, naturally limiting the sandwiching problem even before protocol-level solutions arrive.

Technical Debt and Strategic Development

The contrast between Solana's early "duct tape" development and current strategic approach illuminates how protocols mature. Early development necessarily prioritizes getting something working over architectural elegance. Once a system is running and processing real transactions, the luxury of careful design becomes available.

The challenge is transitioning from firefighting mode to strategic development without breaking existing functionality. ANZA's performance audit approach—bringing in specialists to redesign components from first principles for far more capacity than currently needed—represents one methodology for this transition.

The goal is to reach a state where each component is over-engineered enough that it won't become a bottleneck requiring emergency attention for years. This frees engineering resources for genuinely novel development rather than constant maintenance and patching.

Conclusion

Solana's path to becoming a "decentralized Nasdaq" involves far more than simply increasing transaction throughput. It requires fundamental innovation in market structure, sophisticated economic design to align incentives, and protocol-level changes that give applications the tools they need to compete with traditional finance.

The progress Resnick described—from Alpenglow's surprisingly rapid development to the emergence of proprietary AMMs quoting tighter than centralized exchanges—suggests this vision is not merely aspirational. Concrete work is underway on concrete problems, with realistic timelines for deployment.

What distinguishes this approach from much blockchain development is the relentless focus on outcomes rather than ideology. Whether the answer is CLOBs, proprietary AMMs, or something yet to be invented matters less than whether users get tight spreads and deep liquidity. Whether inflation is 5% or 1% matters less than whether the network is paying unnecessary costs to external parties.

This pragmatism, combined with the technical capability to implement sophisticated solutions and the permissionless environment to experiment freely, positions Solana as a genuine contender in the race to become the world's primary financial infrastructure. The target isn't other blockchains—it's Nasdaq. And the team building Solana appears to understand exactly what that ambition requires.

Facts + Figures

• ANZA formed approximately 18 months ago when Solana Labs core developers split off to focus exclusively on protocol development, with most team members having 4+ years of Solana development experience.

• Alpenglow, Solana's major consensus upgrade, had its first internal devnet running on April 1st, 2025, fully integrated with Agave—far ahead of initial expectations that it would be a multi-year project.

• ANZA is targeting Solana testnet deployment of Alpenglow by December 2025 (Breakpoint in Abu Dhabi), with mainnet launch hoped for early 2026.

• Centralized exchange data shows market makers win the race to cancel stale quotes only approximately 13% of the time, with the situation potentially worse on Solana under current conditions.

• The recent Solana inflation proposal received 62% support from voters, with 75% of stake participating—50% more turnout than any previous Solana governance vote—but failed to reach the 66% threshold required for passage.

• Resnick estimates the US government collects $200-400 million annually in taxes from Solana staking rewards due to the accounting treatment of newly minted tokens.

• Solana's current nominal staking yield is 7-8% APY, though real yield (after accounting for dilution) is significantly lower.

• Only approximately 10% of Solana's stake runs sandwiching operations, compared to more widespread MEV extraction on Ethereum via MEV-Boost.

• The "leader forward window" for transaction landing has shrunk from 3-4 validators to 1-2, with hopes of reaching zero, significantly reducing sandwiching opportunities.

• Solfi, a proprietary AMM revealed to be operated by Ellipsis Labs (creators of Phoenix), at times quotes tighter spreads than Binance on the same trading pairs.

• Resnick's long-term vision involves Solana processing 1 million TPS at 0.2 cents per transaction, generating approximately $60 billion in annual revenue without trade-size-based extraction.

• Ghost.xyz was highlighted as one of the only groups providing open-source intelligence on Solana's MEV landscape, which Resnick characterized as a "black jungle" due to extreme opacity.

• ANZA recently made significant progress on SunTransaction optimizations, with fixes currently in progress for "low hanging fruit" issues.

• The original Serum DEX on Solana achieved approximately 150 million in daily volume during its peak, though the protocol never worked as well as initially hoped.

• Solana now enforces compute unit limits on blocks—a seemingly basic requirement that wasn't implemented during the initial launch rush.

Questions Answered

What is ANZA and what is its relationship to Solana Labs?

ANZA is a separate organization that split off from Solana Labs approximately 18 months ago to focus exclusively on core protocol development. The team consists primarily of engineers who built the original Solana Labs client and have been working on Solana for four or more years. The split was designed to eliminate distractions and allow laser focus on making the Solana client and network operate as efficiently as possible, handling all the infrastructure and protocol-level work while Solana Labs pursues other initiatives. Max Resnick serves as lead economist, applying expertise in economics, game theory, and MEV to protocol design decisions.

When will Alpenglow launch on Solana mainnet?

ANZA is targeting Solana testnet deployment by December 2025, ideally by Breakpoint in Abu Dhabi, with mainnet launch hoped for early 2026. Development has progressed far faster than initially anticipated—what was expected to be a multi-year project had its first internal devnet running by April 1st, 2025, fully integrated with Agave. A second, even faster iteration of the consensus mechanism is now also running on internal devnet. The rapid progress reflects both the maturity of Solana's development processes and the accumulated expertise of the ANZA team.

Why does Max Resnick think central limit order books might not be optimal for blockchain markets?

Resnick argues that CLOBs create significant adverse selection problems for market makers in blockchain environments. When prices change suddenly, there's a race between market makers trying to cancel stale quotes and traders trying to execute against them. Data shows market makers win this race only about 13% of the time on centralized exchanges, and potentially less on Solana. This adverse selection forces market makers to quote wider spreads, resulting in worse prices for users. Instead, proprietary AMMs that can cheaply bring new price information on-chain while benefiting from design choices that favor market makers within Solana's architecture are currently achieving tighter spreads—sometimes even better than Binance.

How has sandwiching on Solana decreased and why?

Sandwiching has decreased primarily because improved transaction landing reliability has reduced how widely transactions need to be broadcast. Previously, users had to spray transactions to many validators due to unreliable landing, meaning a malicious validator with only 10% of stake could see 90% of transactions. As landing has improved, the "leader forward window" has shrunk from 3-4 validators to 1-2, meaning sandwichers see far fewer transactions to exploit