Solana's Internet Capital Markets Roadmap: The Vision to Transform Global Finance

Solana is embarking on an ambitious mission to fundamentally reshape how the world accesses financial markets. The recently published Internet Capital Markets (ICM) roadmap represents a comprehensive strategic vision that aims to make global financial markets accessible to anyone with an internet connection, delivering tighter spreads, deeper liquidity, and faster execution than traditional financial institutions can offer. In a revealing panel discussion featuring Max Resnick from Anza, Lucas Bruder from Jito Labs, and Austin Federa from Double Zero, the architects behind this transformation laid out their plans for revolutionizing market microstructure on the blockchain.

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The conversation arrives at a pivotal moment for Solana and the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem. With the SEC's recent announcement of "Project Crypto" signaling regulatory openness to blockchain-based financial markets, and traditional finance continuing to fumble major opportunities like the Figma IPO's $3.2 billion pricing disaster, the case for on-chain capital markets has never been stronger. The panel discussion delved deep into the technical mechanisms, competitive dynamics, and long-term vision that will define Solana's trajectory over the next several years.

A Departure from "Ship When Ready" Culture

Anza's decision to publish a formal roadmap represents a significant departure from Solana's traditional approach of shipping features as they become ready without extensive forward guidance. Max Resnick explained the rationale behind this strategic shift: applications building on Solana need visibility into the platform's direction to make informed decisions about resource allocation and development strategies.

"We've departed a little bit from the standard Solana approach, which is to just ship things as they're ready and laid out a longer-term view of what the changes are going to be that we're pushing for in the next two or so years," Resnick stated. The reasoning is straightforward—when fundamental changes to transaction sequencing, scheduling, and execution are on the horizon, applications need time to prepare.

This represents a maturation of the Solana ecosystem. As the network attracts more sophisticated financial applications and larger capital allocations, the need for predictability and stability increases. Major trading firms and institutional participants require confidence that the underlying infrastructure won't shift unexpectedly beneath their strategies.

Rethinking the Platform-Application Relationship

The core thesis of the ICM roadmap centers on expanding what applications can control within the Solana runtime. Resnick drew an illuminating analogy to iPhone applications: just as an iPhone app can access the gyroscope, camera, microphone, and screen, Solana applications should have access to a broader set of system-level tools beyond simple state control.

"In Solana, we let the apps control state with their transactions, but we don't let them control other things like ordering of execution, the scheduler, all of these kinds of things," Resnick explained. "It does have an impact in that it limits which kinds of apps you're allowed to build and which kinds of apps are feasible."

This limitation has become increasingly apparent as developers attempt to build sophisticated financial applications that require precise control over transaction ordering. The ability to prioritize certain types of transactions over others—such as cancel orders before taker orders—is fundamental to traditional market microstructure but has been impossible to implement reliably on existing blockchain infrastructure.

The Validator as Dictator Problem

One of the most significant conceptual shifts embedded in the ICM roadmap involves fundamentally changing the relationship between validators and applications. Austin Federa articulated the historical challenge: "The validator or the block builder, whenever a version of that exists in this particular model, is the dictator. There are basically no rules about what a validator can and can't put in a block except that it can't include a transaction whose signature fails."

This permissionless block construction has enabled problematic behaviors like sandwich attacks, where validators can insert their own transactions around user trades to extract value. Traditional exchanges operate under strict rules about what can and can't be done, enforced through permissioned systems and regulatory oversight. Bringing similar protections to a permissionless blockchain requires entirely new architectural approaches.

Federa pointed to Hyperliquid's approach as a turning point for the industry: "When Hyperliquid came out and said we're prioritizing cancels above other types of orders and because we run a closed source network with a permission validator system, we can actually enforce compliance with the rules that we write for the system. That was a pretty big change."

The question facing Solana is whether similar outcomes can be achieved while maintaining the network's permissionless character. The ICM roadmap attempts to answer this affirmatively through application-controlled execution mechanisms that give developers the tools they need without centralizing control.

Short-Term Improvements: BAM and Transaction Landing

The immediate phase of the ICM roadmap focuses on two major initiatives: Jito's Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM) and Anza's transaction landing improvements. These represent the most tangible near-term changes that applications can expect.

Lucas Bruder explained Jito's approach: "Anza's been doing a lot of great work on the networking stack inside of Agave and just able to process way more transactions than it previously was capable of doing. BAM will benefit from some of that technology and then hope to accelerate it a little bit more."

BAM introduces greater transparency and determinism into block construction while providing applications with unprecedented control over transaction sequencing. The system enables what the team calls "application controlled execution" (ACE), allowing developers to specify ordering rules for transactions interacting with their programs.

A blog post released alongside the discussion outlines a first pass at implementing ACE in a permissionless manner. The design philosophy prioritizes accessibility: rather than requiring applications to fork the validator client and convince validators to run custom software, they can deploy ACE configurations through BAM and immediately access this functionality across validators running the standard implementation.

"The cool thing there is that we've been talking to a lot of apps that want to enable ACE, those that are already on Solana, those that want to come on Solana, and it was a very highly requested feature," Bruder noted. "Basically, BAM will give them the tools to enable ACE on hopefully a very large amount of stake very quickly."

The Competitive Landscape: Hyperliquid and Beyond

When asked about Solana's primary competition, the panel offered nuanced perspectives that reveal how the blockchain landscape has evolved. Rather than viewing Ethereum and its layer-two ecosystem as the sole competitor, the emergence of purpose-built execution environments like Hyperliquid has complicated the competitive picture.

Federa offered a balanced assessment: "Is Hyperliquid a competitor to Solana? The answer is yes, but it's also a competitor to Ethereum. It's a competitor to Sui. It's a competitor to Aptos. At the end of the day, any execution layer blockchain is competing with any other execution environment."

What makes Hyperliquid particularly instructive is its demonstration of market demand for better execution quality. Federa characterized the project as occupying a unique position: "You can sort of look at Hyperliquid as the world's worst blockchain or the world's best centralized exchange. I don't think either of those is particularly fair framing."

The key insight is that Hyperliquid proved that combining a good bridge with a quality execution environment enables competition with centralized exchanges like Binance—something no other non-centralized project had previously achieved. This validates the core premise of the ICM roadmap: execution quality matters enormously for capital markets.

Proprietary AMMs: A Paradigm Shift in On-Chain Trading

One of the most technically significant developments discussed involves what the panel termed "proprietary AMMs" or "prop AMMs." These represent a fundamental reimagining of how market-making logic interacts with blockchain infrastructure.

Traditional automated market makers execute trading logic off-chain, with only settlement occurring on the blockchain. Proprietary AMMs flip this model by placing core trading logic directly into Solana programs. This enables immediate response to market conditions without the latency of round-trip communication between trading firm servers and the blockchain.

"The idea of having the core trading logic in a Solana program is the future of finance," Resnick declared. "Everybody who's not looking at this right now is making a huge mistake because this is a clear paradigm shift in the way that we think about everything in crypto."

These proprietary AMMs are already achieving remarkable performance. The panel noted that some are quoting spreads of just one to two basis points on liquid markets—competitive with traditional centralized exchanges. This has been accomplished through intensive optimization, using tools like Pinocchio to dramatically reduce the compute units required for oracle updates and price adjustments.

However, Resnick cautioned that the current market structure enabling this performance may not be sustainable long-term. The tight spreads depend partly on how Jito's auction system prioritizes transactions by tip per compute unit, effectively creating a cancel prioritization mechanism that benefits market makers. Whether this incentive alignment persists as the system evolves remains an open question.

Double Zero: Physical Infrastructure for Digital Markets

The medium-term phase of the ICM roadmap prominently features Double Zero, the physical fiber network infrastructure project led by Austin Federa. This represents perhaps the most ambitious infrastructure initiative in cryptocurrency history—building an alternative pathway for blockchain data using dedicated fiber optic cables.

"What we're able to do is take all of the tools and technologies that were developed for tradfi, for CDNs, for Google's private networks and Amazon's private networks and bring them to blockchain," Federa explained. The key innovation is governance: no single entity controls the network, with 10-20 different network operators following programmatic rules enforced through tokens.

The benefits of dedicated infrastructure extend beyond raw speed. Traditional finance values predictability as much as velocity. Federa illustrated this with a trading example: "If you know it takes you 32 and a half milliseconds to get to the NISY exchange server, you're going to make that trade. If you think it might take 32, but it could take 41, you're not going to make that trade because the variance is too high."

Double Zero's test network, launched August 1st, already demonstrates meaningful improvements. Despite using slower 10 gigabit links across only seven cities, the network beats public internet latency by 35 milliseconds on some routes. The production network rolling out later in the year will feature 100 gigabit connections and redundant pathways.

Geographic distribution represents another key focus. Currently, validator stake concentrates around "gravity wells" in Amsterdam and Tokyo. Double Zero aims to make it profitable for validators to operate in previously underserved locations like Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and the UAE, expanding the network's geographic footprint and improving its resilience.

The Long-Term Vision: Multiple Concurrent Leaders

The most ambitious component of the ICM roadmap involves implementing multiple concurrent leaders (MCL)—a fundamental change to how Solana produces blocks. This represents not just a performance improvement but a philosophical shift in how geographic distribution is conceived.

Currently, geographic distribution functions as a limitation on performance. Information must travel across long distances to reach the current leader, adding latency and variability. MCL transforms this dynamic by allowing multiple nodes in different locations to simultaneously accept and process transactions.

"Right now we look at geographic decentralization as a bug that affects performance because we have to send messages across long distances and this reduces our ability to produce blocks quickly," Resnick explained. "I think in two years, we'll be looking at geographic decentralization as one of the key features that makes Solana special and gives us the ability to do on-chain price discovery, internet capital markets and have really liquid markets around the world settling in the same place at the same time."

The implications are profound. Traditional exchanges are fundamentally local—price discovery for US equities happens in a single data center in Secaucus, New Jersey. High-frequency trading profits largely derive from arbitrage between these hyper-local markets. MCL creates a different paradigm where multiple local markets roll up into a single global market with shared settlement.

Federa drew an unexpected comparison: "In some ways, this is like—I'm going to get so much crap for this—this is the true rollup centric roadmap. Except what's rolling up instead is information as opposed to state."

Competing Visions: Execution vs. Settlement

The discussion touched on the different strategic visions emerging across the blockchain ecosystem. Ethereum has increasingly positioned itself as a "global settlement layer," essentially ceding execution to layer-two networks while focusing on security and finality guarantees for asset settlement.

Resnick offered a pointed critique of this approach: "I don't think that's what they were trying to achieve initially. They just couldn't achieve what they actually wanted to achieve. Like if you look at early writing from 2016, it's not like, 'Oh, we're going to be a settlement layer that JP Morgan is going to use.' Nobody was saying that."

He characterized Ethereum's current positioning as "not a vision" but rather "a lack of vision—a resigning yourself to letting somebody else solve the problem in a way that would not be at all attractive to the Ethereum people of 2016."

The Solana approach remains focused on full-stack execution. Rather than outsourcing trading to centralized layer-two sequencers or traditional financial institutions, the goal is to build infrastructure capable of hosting the entire trading lifecycle on-chain with competitive performance.

Federa framed the strategic choice in stark terms: "If you're trying to compete with a settlement layer, there's two things you're competing with: Bitcoin and the Federal Reserve. If I have to choose who I'm going to compete with, I'm going to choose tradfi as opposed to the US Federal Reserve and Bitcoin."

The Figma IPO Disaster and On-Chain Alternatives

The timing of the discussion coincided with significant news from traditional finance: Figma's IPO appeared to leave approximately $3.2 billion in potential value on the table due to underpricing. This followed a similar situation with Circle's IPO just a month earlier, highlighting systemic problems with the traditional IPO process.

"We're like the day after tradfi just incinerated $3.2 billion on the Figma IPO because they set the price way, way, way too low, like a third of what it actually should have been," Resnick observed. The fundamental problem is structural: IPO pricing relies on analyst judgment rather than market mechanisms.

"It's some guy in his cubicle with a spreadsheet and he types a few numbers in and multiplies three random numbers together and gets a valuation. That's how this thing works for some unknown reason. And then they go on CNBC and they say, 'Oh, we're 30X oversubscribed.' Ask anybody in the first year of their econ course whether being 30X more demand than supply is a good outcome for the market. They will tell you absolutely not."

The permissionless nature of blockchain markets provides a powerful alternative. Without connections at Goldman Sachs or another major investment bank, retail investors cannot access IPO allocations at the initial price. On-chain auctions like Ellipsis Labs' Gavel protocol could democratize access to primary market offerings while achieving more efficient price discovery.

Resnick suggested that Solana's infrastructure is already capable of handling IPO-scale events: "With the pump ICO, we did 600 million of capital raised in 12 minutes and didn't go down even though the exchanges went down. So I think we're kind of ready right now for the initial IPOs."

Regulatory Tailwinds and SEC's Project Crypto

The conversation took on added significance given the SEC's announcement of "Project Crypto" the day before, with Chair Atkins publicly stating the agency wants to bring financial markets on-chain. This represents a dramatic shift from previous regulatory hostility and potentially removes one of the largest obstacles to institutional adoption of blockchain-based markets.

Resnick connected the regulatory opening to the technical advantages of on-chain execution: "As soon as one does it, you're going to see a cascade of them because what is holding it back is this risk aversion. Nobody got fired because they incinerated 3.2 billion dollars of Figma assets that should have gone to the Figma team and Figma investors during this IPO process, but they should have."

The regulatory barrier has forced traditional finance into demonstrably inefficient practices. The SEC has historically blocked innovations like asymmetric speed bumps that could improve market quality. Blockchain-based markets operating in a more permissive regulatory environment can implement optimizations that traditional exchanges cannot.

"Even simple things like CBOE applied for a four millisecond asymmetric speed bump. And they denied it and said it wasn't fair. It's like, okay, you guys don't want to compete. You guys are the Europe of financial applications," Resnick quipped. "We're going to be able to innovate in a way that tradfi cannot innovate, even if they did want to innovate, which they don't."

Managing Bad Actors in a Permissionless System

Lucas Bruder addressed one of the persistent challenges in building open blockchain infrastructure: preventing malicious behavior while maintaining permissionless access. Jito has extensive experience with this tension, having dealt with sandwich attacks throughout 2024 and eventually removing the mempool to address the problem.

The Jito Foundation established a blacklist of addresses that won't receive stake from the Jito stake pool—a social coordination mechanism that imposes economic consequences on bad actors without requiring protocol-level enforcement. Bruder characterized the ongoing challenge: "It is a cat and mouse game. But ideally we can figure it out and make sure that we're helping support the network."

For BAM and application-controlled execution, the goal is to make these tools as permissionless as possible. Jito is assembling an ecosystem advisory committee with multiple stakeholders to help navigate these decisions collectively rather than unilaterally.

"We're hoping that if we can talk to a bunch of applications, figure out common patterns between them and just build very generic types of plugins that are permissionless, that is a very optimistic path forward," Bruder explained. The approach prioritizes building general-purpose infrastructure that serves broad needs rather than custom solutions that might entrench particular participants.

The Importance of Validator Economics

A recurring theme throughout the discussion was the critical importance of aligning validator incentives with network health and application success. Austin Federa emphasized that validators are fundamentally self-interested actors, and any sustainable infrastructure must make good behavior economically attractive.

"We can't basically trust everyone to make good decisions on behalf of the long term of the network. These are fundamentally self-interested actors who are running validators as they should be in a good capitalist society," Federa stated.

This is why Double Zero launched a stake pool (DZ SOL) that directs stake to validators on the network—creating direct economic incentives for validators to adopt the infrastructure. Similarly, Jito's stake pool directs rewards toward validators meeting certain criteria.

The philosophy extends to the broader architecture of the ICM roadmap. The goal is to create systems where the Nash equilibrium—the outcome where no participant can improve their position by changing strategy—produces desirable market outcomes. As Resnick described multiple concurrent leaders: "The Nash equilibrium is just see transaction, include transaction with highest fee. And then everything else downstream of that is up to the apps."

Weaponizing Greed for Positive Outcomes

One of the most philosophically interesting aspects of the discussion involved the recognition that blockchain's power derives from harnessing self-interest rather than suppressing it. Federa articulated this clearly: "The thing that has made blockchain so powerful over the years is everyone trying to screw each other over makes a system that is beneficial for everyone. Like that sort of idea of weaponizing greed to produce positive sum outcomes is the core philosophy of blockchain."

This stands in stark contrast to traditional financial regulation, which attempts to impose fairness on fundamentally permissioned systems. Blockchain systems can achieve similar or better outcomes through mechanism design that makes good behavior profitable and bad behavior unprofitable.

The ICM roadmap represents the "truest expression of this since the advent of Bitcoin," according to Federa. Rather than relying on regulators or administrators to enforce rules, the system design itself channels competitive dynamics toward beneficial outcomes.

Technical Underpinnings: Alpenglow and Vote Confirmations

The medium-term roadmap includes Alpenglow, a consensus mechanism advancement that treats votes differently to enable faster confirmations. This technical improvement supports the broader goal of reducing block times and improving finality guarantees.

Resnick outlined the trajectory: "We're talking about, when we're talking about finality, hard finality in the blockchain sense, in the next few years, just with the technology we have today." Current confirmation times around 1.2 seconds could potentially decrease to 300 milliseconds with existing technology.

When combined with on-chain program logic that can respond immediately without waiting for full finality, applications can achieve trading experiences that rival or exceed centralized systems. "You're putting your program on chain and it's immediately responding with the strategy that you pre-programmed. So you don't have to wait for the finality to get another trade in there."

Competition and Innovation Culture

The panel repeatedly emphasized the importance of maintaining competitive dynamics within the Solana ecosystem. Federa expressed hope that BAM would eventually face competition: "I hope there's a competitor to BAM that pops up because that's the whole point of open source projects and competition is that we really want to make sure that there's a flywheel of competition that rewards higher performance."

This represents a departure from how some blockchain ecosystems have evolved, where dominant infrastructure becomes effectively "nationalized" through enshrining it in the protocol. The Solana approach prefers to say "this is an exceedingly good option, everyone should use this option" while maintaining space for competitors to emerge.

The permissionless nature of Solana enables this competitive dynamic. If someone can build a better block engine than BAM, they're free to do so and compete for validator adoption. This creates pressure for continuous improvement that would be absent in a more ossified system.

Practical Implications for Developers

For application developers, the ICM roadmap provides several concrete takeaways. First, the ability to specify transaction ordering rules through BAM and ACE plugins will enable entirely new categories of applications that previously couldn't function reliably on-chain.

Second, the reduction in latency and jitter from Double Zero integration will make time-sensitive trading strategies viable. Applications can begin planning for an environment where network timing is predictable rather than variable.

Third, the movement toward on-chain program logic means developers should be investing in optimizing their Solana programs rather than building complex off-chain systems. The trend toward proprietary AMMs suggests that competitive advantage will increasingly come from on-chain execution efficiency.

Finally, developers should expect continued evolution. While the roadmap provides guidance, the panel was clear that this represents current thinking rather than locked-in specifications. The culture of shipping and iterating remains central to Solana's development philosophy.

The Permissionless Advantage

A unifying thread throughout the discussion was the fundamental importance of permissionlessness to Solana's competitive position. Every advantage the panel described—from application-controlled execution to multiple concurrent leaders—only works because running a validator doesn't require anyone's approval.

Federa made this explicit: "All of these things only work if running a validator is permissionless. Permissionless obviously does not mean free—permissionless still means you have to run a server and pay vote credits and all these things. But permissionless is the unlock here."

For traditional finance, accessing an exchange requires relationships, approvals, and often significant capital requirements. A startup trading firm needs extensive legal and compliance infrastructure before it can place a single trade. On Solana, anyone can deploy a program and begin trading immediately.

This access difference compounds over time. Innovation happens at the edges, where new participants try new things without seeking permission. By maintaining permissionless access while improving execution quality, Solana aims to attract the innovative energy that more restricted systems cannot.

Looking Forward

The Internet Capital Markets roadmap represents Solana's most comprehensive articulation of its vision for blockchain-based finance. Unlike vague promises about future capabilities, the roadmap identifies specific technical developments with rough timelines and explains how they work together toward a coherent goal.

The short-term improvements from BAM and Anza's transaction landing work should materialize within months. Medium-term developments like Double Zero network expansion and Alpenglow will roll out over the coming year. The long-term vision of multiple concurrent leaders requires more research and development but has a clear theoretical foundation.

Perhaps most importantly, the discussion revealed an ecosystem that understands both the technical and economic dimensions of its challenge. Building better technology isn't sufficient—the technology must create incentive structures that encourage adoption and continued improvement. The panel's sophisticated treatment of validator economics, competitive dynamics, and mechanism design suggests this understanding is deeply embedded in Solana's development culture.

As traditional finance continues demonstrating its limitations through events like the Figma IPO debacle, and regulators signal increasing openness to blockchain alternatives, the window for crypto-native capital markets has never been wider. Solana's ICM roadmap provides a detailed plan for seizing that opportunity, and the teams building it appear well-positioned to execute.

Facts + Figures

• Double Zero Test Network Performance: The test network, which uses slower 10 gigabit links across only seven cities, is already beating public internet latency by 35 milliseconds on some routes. The production network will feature 100 gigabit connections.

• Proprietary AMM Spreads: New proprietary AMMs on Solana are quoting spreads of just one to two basis points on liquid markets, competitive with traditional centralized exchanges.

• Compute Unit Optimization: Some oracle update transactions have been optimized to below 1,000 compute units, compared to approximately 150,000 compute units for typical Jupiter swap transactions—a 150X priority difference under Jito's tip-per-CU system.

• Pump ICO Statistics: Solana handled $600 million in capital raised for the Pump ICO in just 12 minutes without experiencing downtime, while centralized exchanges experienced outages.

• Figma IPO Underpricing: Traditional finance's IPO process left approximately $3.2 billion in potential value unrealized due to underpricing, following a similar situation with Circle's IPO a month earlier.

• Block Time Targets: Current confirmation times of approximately 1.2 seconds could potentially decrease to 300 milliseconds with existing technology, according to Anza's projections.

• Cluster Parameter Improvements: Solana has moved from 48 million compute units to 60 million compute units to potentially 100 million compute units in 2025, though block times haven't shortened proportionally.

• Double Zero Stake Pool: The DZ SOL stake pool launched to direct stake to validators operating on the Double Zero network, creating economic incentives for infrastructure adoption.

• Geographic Expansion: Double Zero is building fiber connectivity to previously underserved regions including Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and the UAE to expand validator geographic distribution beyond Amsterdam and Tokyo gravity wells.

• ICM Roadmap Timeframe: The roadmap covers approximately a two-year horizon, departing from Solana's traditional approach of shipping features without extensive forward guidance.

• SEC Announcement Timing: The discussion occurred one day after the SEC announced "Project Crypto" with Chair Atkins publicly stating the agency wants to bring financial markets on-chain.

• BAM ACE Blog Post: A blog post detailing the first pass at application-controlled execution in BAM was released on July 31st, accompanying the ICM roadmap announcement.

• Jito Ecosystem Advisory Committee: Jito is forming an ecosystem advisory committee with multiple stakeholders to help make decisions about plugin permissioning and system governance.

• Multiple Concurrent Leaders: The long-term vision involves multiple nodes in different geographic locations simultaneously accepting and processing transactions, fundamentally changing how geographic distribution affects performance.

Questions Answered

What is the Internet Capital Markets (ICM) roadmap?

The Internet Capital Markets roadmap is Anza's strategic vision document outlining how Solana will evolve over the next two years to become the infrastructure for global financial markets accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Unlike Solana's typical approach of shipping features without advance notice, this roadmap provides forward guidance so applications can plan accordingly. The core philosophy is expanding what applications can control within the Solana runtime—giving developers tools to manage transaction ordering and execution similar to how traditional exchanges implement market microstructure rules. The roadmap includes short-term improvements like Jito's Block Assembly Marketplace and Anza's transaction landing enhancements, medium-term projects like Double Zero's fiber network infrastructure, and long-term architectural changes like multiple concurrent leaders.

Why is Solana focusing on market microstructure instead of just speed and throughput?

While Solana has historically prioritized "increased bandwidth, reduced latency" (the IBRL meme), the ecosystem realized that making everything faster and cheaper doesn't automatically produce efficient markets. From the very beginning, Solana was built to "put an order book on the blockchain" and enable internet capital markets, but simply improving raw performance doesn't deliver every property needed for efficient on-chain markets. Specific mechanisms around transaction ordering have proven crucial for building competitive trading venues. Traditional exchanges implement rules like prioritizing cancel orders before taker orders to improve market quality—these capabilities don't emerge automatically from faster block times. The shift to market microstructure focus isn't new but rather represents recognition that the initial tools weren't sufficient to achieve the original vision.

What is application-controlled execution (ACE) and why does it matter?

Application-controlled execution is a mechanism that allows applications to specify rules for how transactions interacting with their programs should be ordered and processed. Previously, validators functioned as "dictators" who could arrange transactions in any order they chose, enabling problematic behaviors like sandwich attacks. ACE gives developers the ability to define ordering preferences—such as processing cancel orders before taker orders—that improve market quality for their users. This represents a fundamental shift in the validator-application relationship. Instead of applications having to trust validators to behave well, they can programmatically enforce the behaviors they need. Jito's Block Assembly Marketplace will enable ACE through permissionless plugins, allowing applications to access this functionality without forking the validator client or convincing validators to run custom software.

What is Double Zero and how does it improve Solana's performance?

Double Zero is a physical fiber optic network infrastructure project that provides an alternative pathway for blockchain data using dedicated cables rather than the public internet. The project aggregates 10-20 different network operators who follow programmatic rules enforced through tokens, creating a decentralized governance model that enables collective use of premium infrastructure. The benefits include not just faster transmission but crucially reduced variability—Double Zero eliminates the unpredictable latency "jitter" that makes certain trading strategies impossible on the public internet. Even the limited test network with slower 10 gigabit links is beating public internet latency by 35 milliseconds on some routes. The production network launching later in 2025 will feature 100 gigabit connections and expand geographic coverage to underserved regions like South America and the Middle East.

How do proprietary AMMs differ from traditional automated market makers?

Proprietary AMMs represent a paradigm shift where market-making logic traditionally executed on trading firm servers moves directly into Solana programs. This eliminates the round-trip latency between external systems and the blockchain—the program can respond immediately to on-chain events without waiting for off-chain computation. These optimized programs can achieve remarkably tight spreads; some are currently quoting one to two basis points on liquid markets. The optimization comes partly from intensive compute unit reduction—some oracle updates have been compressed to below 1,000 compute units compared to roughly 150,000 for typical swap transactions. This creates effective cancel prioritization under Jito's current tip-per-CU system. Max Resnick called this approach "the future of finance" and warned that anyone not studying proprietary AMMs is making a strategic mistake.

What are multiple concurrent leaders and how do they enable better markets?

Multiple concurrent leaders (MCL) is a proposed architectural change where several validators in different geographic locations can simultaneously produce blocks rather than the current model of one leader at a time. This transforms geographic distribution from a performance limitation into a competitive advantage. Traditional exchanges are hyper-local—price discovery for US equities happens in one data center in New Jersey. High-frequency trading profits largely derive from arbitrage between these local markets. With MCL, each leader effectively creates a local market that rolls up into a single global settlement layer. Information anywhere in the world only needs to travel to the nearest concurrent leader rather than to a single global leader. Austin Federa described this as "the true rollup centric roadmap, except what's rolling up is information as opposed to state."

Is Hyperliquid Solana's biggest competitor?

The panel offered nuanced views on competition. While Hyperliquid has demonstrated remarkable product-market fit and shown that combining a good bridge with quality execution enables competition with Binance, it competes with all execution layer blockchains—Ethereum, Sui, and Aptos included. What Hyperliquid proved is that the space between traditional DEXs and centralized exchanges represents a significant market opportunity. Solana can learn from Hyperliquid's innovations, like cancel prioritization, and implement similar capabilities through application-controlled execution while maintaining permissionless architecture. The competitive dynamic is healthy because it validates the importance of execution quality and drives innovation across the ecosystem. The panel emphasized that seeing good ideas from other ecosystems and bringing them into Solana is "one of the features of crypto, not a bug."

Why does Solana reject Ethereum's "settlement layer" positioning?

Max Resnick characterized Ethereum's settlement layer narrative as "not a vision" but rather "a lack of vision—resigning yourself to letting somebody else solve the problem." Early Ethereum writing from 2016 described replacing all of finance and banking the unbanked, not becoming infrastructure for JP Morgan. The settlement layer positioning emerged because Ethereum couldn't achieve its original execution-focused goals due to scalability constraints. Austin Federa added strategic perspective: competing with settlement layers means competing with Bitcoin and the Federal Reserve, while competing on execution means competing with traditional finance—a more tractable challenge. The ultimate settlement layer is physical safety; everything else is abstraction. Execution, by contrast, is "the purest extension of a market, which can exist in the absence of physicality" and represents the most promising space for blockchain innovation.

How does Solana handle bad actors while maintaining permissionless access?

Jito's experience with sandwich attacks illustrates the approach: social coordination mechanisms impose economic consequences on bad actors without requiring protocol-level enforcement. The Jito Foundation established a blacklist of addresses excluded from the Jito stake pool. The Jito Sol stake pool directs stake away from validators engaging in harmful behavior. This creates financial incentives for good behavior without sacrificing permissionless access. For BAM and application-controlled execution, the goal is making tools as permissionless as possible while building in accountability mechanisms. Jito is forming an ecosystem advisory committee with multiple stakeholders to navigate these decisions collectively. The approach prioritizes building generic, permissionless plugins that serve broad needs rather than custom solutions that might entrench particular participants.

Could major companies like SpaceX IPO on Solana?

The