Here's the English translation:
Yesterday, Solana announced a
new roadmap.
Essentially, as improvements across different chains have entered deep waters, leading to some technical jargon, I'll try to interpret Solana's new roadmap in a way everyone can understand, along with my own analysis.
First, Solana underwent a major narrative shift in 2024, with **Solana's goal becoming to establish an "Internet Capital Market"**, whereas previously, Solana's goal was to build a high-performance blockchain.
**An Internet Capital Market, as the name suggests, aims to create a borderless, 24/7 financial market where various assets—such as stocks, bonds, currencies, and real-world assets (RWA)—are tokenized and seamlessly traded on-chain.**
This serves as the overall guideline, and to achieve this, tasks need to be broken down.
This Solana roadmap, to be precise, is the technical department's roadmap, aiming to help implement the "Internet Capital Market" concept, so you won't see Solana's business or compliance efforts.
You can understand this as Solana's technical roadmap.
[Image]
Solana's technical side isn't just the core developers from Solana Labs, but also includes several important roles, such as:
1. Anza, the big brother. A low-key Solana development company founded by former Solana Labs team members. I personally think its role is similar to the relationship between ConsenSys/Ethereum, or Blockstream/Bitcoin.
2. Jito, the second brother. This is Solana's version of Lido, but with even more power because Jito also controls almost all of Solana's MEV life and death.
3. Multicoin, at least the third brother. Although it's a capital firm, due to holding many SOL and SOL ecosystem projects, it definitely has a say in the technical realm.
4. DoubleZero, a junior, focusing on accelerating network speed.
5. Drift, also a junior, a perpetual contract that also participates in some Solana feature development.
**The official Solana Labs, plus these three giants and two small warriors, form a six-person group that is essentially Solana's true technical reform committee.**
**Next, let's look at what efforts the Solana technical department needs to make to realize the "Internet Capital Market".**
The Internet Capital Market is a slogan-like concept that doesn't specify how everyone should proceed.
Therefore, to help developers "work in the same direction", the technical department translated this slogan into technical language: "Application-Controlled Execution (ACE)".
This is where it gets complicated. What exactly is this Application-Controlled Execution (ACE)?
Solana believes that **an Internet financial market (especially comparable to Web2) must meet one condition: financial applications must have millisecond-level control over their own transaction ordering.**
**Note: It requires ordering rights, millisecond-level precision, and control.**
Therefore, to implement Application-Controlled Execution (ACE), Solana's technology still lacks many things. What exactly is missing can be seen in the roadmap:
**· Short-term goals (1-3 months):** More order book-friendly, suppress malicious MEV sandwich attacks, reduce transaction latency.
**· Medium-term goals (3-9 months):** Reduce latency through dedicated fiber optic networks; significantly modify Solana's consensus algorithm to shorten transaction finality time; reduce transaction latency.
**· Long-term goals (9-30 months):** Transform Solana's consensus algorithm from a single leader to multiple leaders to increase system resistance to extreme risks and censorship, giving applications more ordering rights.
[The rest of the translation follows the same detailed approach]
Solana's new consensus mechanism is called Alpenglow, meaning "Alpine Glow", symbolizing the protocol's Swiss origin.
This Alpine mountain consensus mechanism can be simply summarized by three characteristics:
(1) Final confirmation reduced to 150 milliseconds (3x faster than competitors)
(2) No more voting (off-chain signatures, saving money for small nodes)
(3) More elegant (eliminating technical debt, preparing for multiple leaders)
Under the new Alpenglow consensus, it remains a single leader, but:
1. Propagation layer: Introduced relay nodes to help forward transactions, thus greatly reducing latency.
2. Voting layer: Although fault tolerance reduced from 33% to 20%, with a small sacrifice in security, the time to final confirmation is greatly shortened. Additionally, cryptography is used to ensure voting becomes off-chain.
This aims to shorten the final determination time to 150 milliseconds.
Finally, the long-term goal (9-30 months): Transform Solana's consensus algorithm from a single leader to multiple leaders to increase system resistance to extreme risks and censorship, giving applications more sorting rights.
This is understandable because 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 wanting to censor transactions or sort transactions (instead of letting applications sort themselves).
Why is Solana so persistent about letting financial applications sort their own transactions? Let me give you an example, and you'll understand. Imagine you're trading stocks through a brokerage, and China Telecom constantly uses its network base station advantage to interfere with your trades. Can you tolerate that? Right. MEV is actually unreasonable, but everyone has gotten used to it. How can the power of the chain and nodes override applications?
Therefore, to avoid this worst-case scenario, Solana must introduce a multi-leader model in the future. This way, if one leader node misbehaves, including but not limited to censoring transactions (such as addresses sanctioned by the US) or sorting transactions (like creating sandwich attacks), other leaders must be able to counteract it.
This section is relatively short because there is currently no clear path to implement it, and it remains in the discussion of an ideal scenario.
So, you see this short-medium-long-term technical goal, from the simplest block sorting to later complex consensus mechanism improvements, to ultimately adding the extremely difficult multi-leader mode, is essentially a gradual process serving the ultimate goal of an "Internet Capital Market".
Finally, although Solana's technical roadmap is filled with a lot of technical jargon and abbreviations, after analysis, its technical route is undoubtedly effective and feasible. We look forward to the day when traditional financial applications truly take root on Solana!
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