Solana’s Roadmap: Internet Capital Markets

Solana’s ecosystem is evolving around a new vision termed “Internet Capital Markets,” aimed at establishing a decentralized, high-performance base for future on-chain financial applications.

While traditionally enhancing bandwidth and reducing latency, the latest roadmap prioritizes market microstructure, emphasizing the need for applications to control transaction execution at a granular level.

This roadmap, jointly authored by leaders from the Solana Foundation, Anza, Jito Labs, DoubleZero, Drift, and Multicoin Capital, introduces Application-Controlled Execution (ACE), enabling smart contracts to manage transaction sequencing with millisecond precision.

According to the authors, addressing market microstructure is crucial for Solana’s progress today.

Published by Anza on Thursday, the new roadmap discusses six essential tradeoff areas: privacy vs. transparency, speedbumps vs. unrestricted trading, inclusion vs. finality vs. latency, colocation vs. geographic decentralization, makers-first vs. takers-first strategies, and flexible vs. opinionated architecture.

Instead of a standardized protocol, Solana aims to create infrastructure that allows developers to explore these tradeoffs in practical applications.

As part of this vision, a range of initiatives will be launched in short, medium, and long-term phases. In the short-term, Jito Labs will unveil the Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM) by the end of the month, providing transaction processing tools for Solana validators, traders, and applications. This system aims to blend privacy and transparency in on-chain trading, facilitating the deployment of Central Limit Order Books (CLOBs) to rival centralized exchanges.

Additionally, Anza is enhancing transaction landing reliability to ensure consistent transaction inclusion within the same slot.

In the medium-term, over the next three to nine months, projects like DoubleZero—a fiber network aiming to diminish latency while boosting bandwidth—and Alpenglow—a new consensus protocol reducing block finality from 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds—will be implemented to improve Solana’s network.

Looking to the long-term, through 2027 and beyond, Solana plans to introduce Multiple Concurrent Leaders (MCL) and ACE to facilitate the most liquid on-chain markets.

These upgrades address the “Single Leader Problem,” where one validator oversees transaction inclusion, allowing various validators to propose transactions simultaneously, which can reduce censorship and manipulation. By sorting transactions by priority fees, applications could develop unique execution strategies including cancel prioritization and in-block auctions.

MCL will enable Solana to process global market data in real-time, allowing smart contracts to immediately respond to developments in major markets like New York and Tokyo. This infrastructure will establish the technical foundation for what the Solana ecosystem envisions as a decentralized, globally synchronized financial system.

In essence, Solana aims to provide tools tailored for internet capital markets that cannot be emulated by centralized systems.

Read more: Jito Launches BAM to Reshape Solana’s Blockspace Economy