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Anza
Anza is a software development firm and research group dedicated to the Solana blockchain ecosystem, founded in January 2023 by former executives and core engineers of Solana Labs.[1][2] The organization describes itself as an engineering organization that "engineers Solana and ships the software that pushes the boundaries of blockchain performance and scale," and its self-described mission is to build "the most robust Web3 protocols" as a collaborative, open-source partner for core Solana infrastructure.[3][1]
Overview
Anza was founded by experienced executives and engineers drawn from the original Solana Labs team, with a stated belief that robust blockchain protocols "are best built out in the open, with multiple contributors."[3] Jeff Washington, a former core member of Solana Labs, serves as the company's chief executive officer, and Jed Halfon is its chief strategy officer.[2] Other founders named from the original Solana team include Stephen Akridge, Amber Christiansen, Pankaj Garg, and Jon Cinque, described as experienced blockchain engineers and executives.[2]
The company has recruited heavily from academia and the broader blockchain industry to strengthen Solana's protocol design and resilience. Professor Roger Wattenhofer of ETH Zurich leads research on the Solana protocol at Anza and is listed as its Head of Research; he is a full professor in ETH Zurich's Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, and he joined Anza together with PhD students Kobi Sliwinski and Quentin Kniep.[2][1] Max Resnick, previously a prominent Ethereum researcher and the former Head of Research at Consensys' Special Mechanisms Group, joined Anza to focus on Solana's fee markets, consensus, and validator innovations.[2] Ashwin, who goes by the handle , leads the consensus team at Anza building Alpenglow.[4]
Agave Validator Client
Agave is Anza's defining product, described by the company as "Solana's gold standard client" and "Solana's majority validator client built by the engineers closest to the protocol," designed for performance, reliability, and long-term network health.[3] A validator client is the software that runs the individual nodes forming the backbone of a blockchain network, and client diversity — running multiple independent implementations — is a design goal because it enhances network resiliency and uptime and increases resistance to attacks or bugs that might affect a single codebase.[5][2]
Agave originated as a fork of the original Solana validator previously maintained by the Solana Labs team, taken from the solana-labs/solana monorepo.[5][1] Core development formally transitioned to the anza-xyz/agave repository beginning in January 2024. During the transition, versions v1.17 and v1.18 were released in parallel across both repositories through mid-2024, and v2.0 in October 2024 marked the point at which Agave became the sole release vehicle.[1] Six binaries were renamed from the solana-* prefix to agave-* during the transition, including agave-validator, agave-ledger-tool, agave-watchtower, and agave-install.[1] As of mid-2026 the Agave repository is reported to carry 1,879 GitHub stars and 6,284 forks.[1]
Agave implements protocol upgrades, performance optimizations, and security enhancements intended to improve Solana's reliability and uptime, and it remains under active development by Anza's core engineering team.[1][5] The client's documentation, hosted at docs.anza.xyz, is the canonical reference for validator operators. It covers a command line interface and tool suite, including installing the Solana CLI, choosing a cluster among devnet, testnet, and mainnet-beta, and creating a command line wallet; an architectural overview explaining clusters as collections of validators that work together for consensus, validators as the individual network nodes, and the runtime as the native programs core to the validator and blockchain; and guidance on running a validator, covering the difference between voting validators and non-voting RPC nodes, recommended hardware and expected SOL requirements, and a quick start guide for connecting to a cluster.[5]
Anza maintains Agave's release schedules publicly to keep operators informed of network changes. It published an Agave v4.4 schedule on September 22, 2026, and an Agave v4.3 schedule whose September 28 entry resumed feature activation on mainnet-beta.[1] The company has stated that validators, RPC providers, security researchers, and Solana ecosystem teams hear about upgrade notices, activation timelines, and critical release notes from Anza first.[3]
Alpenglow and Consensus
Alpenglow is a new consensus protocol created by Anza and announced in 2025, described as "the new consensus protocol powering Solana's next era of speed and finality."[3][1] It is designed to reduce finalization latency using BLS cryptography and, as of late September 2026, is live on Solana public testnet and devnet, while mainnet-beta continues to run TowerBFT and has no announced activation date for Alpenglow.[1][6] Alpenglow replaces TowerBFT, Solana's original consensus mechanism, and its finality component is named Votor, which finalizes blocks while moving validator votes entirely off-chain.[1]
Research
Anza operates a dedicated research division, Anza Research, led by ETH Zurich researchers and focused on consensus protocol upgrades, security improvements, and scalability studies.[2] The group's academic contributors have produced formal protocol proposals through Solana's SIMD (Solana Improvement Document) process. Quentin Kniep and Roger Wattenhofer authored SIMD-0674 and SIMD-0675, which propose a geo-aware Solana leader schedule, with Kniep listed first and Wattenhofer as co-author on both.[1] Kniep and Wattenhofer also led a Solana Scholars programme that funded three-month research internships.[1]
Anza's security work combines proposed protocol mechanisms with internal testing. The company developed and proposed slashing mechanisms — penalties that reduce a misbehaving validator's staked funds — under SIMD-0204 and SIMD-0212, and it operates an internal adversarial testing function called the "Invalidator" team.[1] A January 2026 security patch from Anza addressed gossip and vote processing vulnerabilities.[1] The research division has also examined post-quantum preparedness through work called "Quantumglow," which studies how Solana's cryptographic primitives would need to evolve under quantum-computing threats.[1] Anza announced sRFC 38 in December 2025 as part of its standards engagement with the wider ecosystem.[1]
Protocol changes on Solana require coordination with other client teams. The repository merge bot for PR #649 required approvals from at least one Anza team member and one Firedancer team member, and SIMD-0649 closed without merging.[1] Anza complements its code with public research writing, publishing blog posts on topics such as the Central Scheduler architecture, AccountsDB internals, Timely Vote Credits economics, and validator issuance analysis.[1]
Developer Tools and Libraries
Beyond its validator client and consensus work, Anza maintains a broad portfolio of developer tooling and libraries, described internally as infrastructure expansion covering token extensions, permissioned environments, SDKs, and developer tools.[2] Its featured projects include:
- Pinocchio — a minimal, dependency-free Rust framework that helps developers create high-performance Solana programs.[3]
- P-Token — a lightweight token implementation that allows a more flexible token program design for Solana.[3]
- Codama — a tool that generates client code and standardized, IDL-style interface descriptions for Solana programs.[3][1]
- Solana Kit SDK — a modular JavaScript/TypeScript SDK for building Solana applications across Node.js, web browsers, and React Native, featuring native cryptographic operations, a tree-shakable architecture, and zero external dependencies; it was versioned to v7 as of July 2026, adding React hooks and transaction introspection.[3][1]
- Wincode — a fast, bincode-wire-compatible serializer and deserializer for Rust, originally built for the Agave validator and focused on in-place initialization and performance.[3][1]
- Mollusk — an SVM program test harness for offline unit testing of on-chain programs.[1]
- SBPF — a maintained fork of the Solana BPF virtual machine, originally solana-labs/rbpf.[1]
- Solana Programs — a collection of highly optimized on-chain programs that power the Solana ecosystem.[3]
Anza also maintains the Solana Platform SDK, which provides Clang and Rust compilers for the Solana Virtual Machine along with C headers and Rust crates that expose runtime features for on-chain program development.[1] To support systems-level optimization of Solana's execution environment, the company's GitHub organization maintains forks of the Rust compiler, LLVM, and Cargo, as well as repositories referred to as Anza–Move and Platform Tools.[1][2]
Roadmap and Block Production
Anza organizes its forward work around annual roadmaps and a set of block-production initiatives aimed at improving Solana's throughput and latency. Its stated roadmap execution efforts target optimizing transaction efficiency, doubling Solana's blockspace, and modernizing the Solana network stack.[2] The 2026 roadmap, called Anza26, identifies four categories of work: performance and liveness; operator experience, which includes Block Revenue Distribution under SIMD-0123; developer experience, covering rent reduction, larger transaction sizes, and p-ATA migration; and user experience.[1]
Two block-production initiatives are central to Anza's performance agenda. Multiple Concurrent Proposers (MCP) shifts transaction ordering enforcement in-protocol to the replay stage, reducing a single leader's influence over ordering.[1] The Increase Bandwidth / Reduce Latency (IBRL) initiative targets 100 million Compute Unit block limits, XDP-based shred transmission by default, and direct memory mapping inside the Solana Virtual Machine.[1] Anza has reported previously maintaining slot times below 400 milliseconds through earlier block limit expansions, and it has cited a prior achievement of "zero network downtime" as a baseline for continued reliability targets.[1]
Anza participates in the Solana developer community's annual Breakpoint conference, with the 2026 edition to be held in London in November.[4]
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