Interpretation of Solana's Technical Roadmap: Building an On-Chain Capital Market

Solana recently unveiled a new technical roadmap aimed at achieving its vision of an "Internet Capital Market". This goal means creating a round-the-clock, borderless financial market where various assets (such as stocks, bonds, currencies, and physical assets) can be tokenized and traded seamlessly on-chain.

To achieve this grand goal, the Solana technical team has developed a series of short-term, medium-term, and long-term plans. This roadmap was mainly developed by Solana Labs and several other key partners, including Anza, Jito, Multicoin, DoubleZero, and Drift.

The technical team proposed the concept of "Application Control Execution" (ACE), emphasizing that financial applications need millisecond-level control over their transaction ordering. To this end, Solana plans to improve in the following areas:

Short-term goals (1-3 months):

• Optimize order book functionality
• Suppress malicious MEV behavior
• Reduce trading latency

Mid-term goal (3-9 months):

• Reduce network latency through dedicated fiber optic networks
• Improve the Solana consensus algorithm to shorten the transaction final confirmation time.
• Further reduce transaction latency

Long-term goals (9-30 months):

• Shift from a single leadership model to a multi-leadership model
• Improve the system's risk resistance and censorship resistance capabilities.
• Grant greater trading priority to applications

In the short-term plan, Jito and Anza will be responsible for developing the new trading construction tool BAM to support more efficient order book operations. At the same time, they will also work to suppress malicious MEV behavior and reduce transaction latency through the new TPU client.

The mid-term plan will be led by DoubleZero and Anza. DoubleZero plans to improve the bandwidth of verification nodes by establishing a dedicated fiber optic network. Anza, on the other hand, will focus on developing a new consensus mechanism called Alpenglow, aimed at reducing the transaction finality time from the current 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds. This improvement will be achieved by introducing relay nodes and optimizing the voting mechanism.

The long-term goal is to transition Solana's consensus mechanism from a single leader model to a multi-leader model. This transformation aims to enhance the system's anti-censorship capabilities and provide greater transaction ordering autonomy for applications. However, the specific path to achieve this goal is still under discussion.

Overall, Solana's technical roadmap demonstrates its commitment to building a true on-chain Capital Market. From optimizing block ordering to improving consensus mechanisms, and introducing a multi-leadership model, each step is carefully designed to achieve this ultimate goal. As these technological improvements are gradually implemented, we can expect to see more traditional financial applications taking root in the Solana ecosystem.