Lightspeed Newsletter Segment

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

A few months ago, I was bewitched into clicking on solanaroadmap.com, a website that just reads “increase bandwidth reduce latency” — Solana’s preferred rallying cry of late. So it took me a few days to get around to checking out an apparent 2025 roadmap put out by Anza, which is the developer shop spun out of Solana Labs.

This roadmap was not a troll. It teased Anza’s plans to double Solana blockspace this year and laid out a bunch of smaller improvements meant to equip Solana to handle transactions more efficiently. As Solana prepares for a wider rollout of the high-performance Firedancer client, Anza is still eating its veggies, so to speak, by making small but necessary changes to Solana’s code.

Anza develops Solana’s Agave client — the original validator software put out by Solana Labs — and works on a number of other engineering problems, similarly to how blockchain “labs” entities tend to work. Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz frequently mentions on the Lightspeed podcast that ironing out a number of small inefficiencies in Solana’s codebase could greatly improve the network’s already-industry-leading performance. Anza’s 2025 roadmap expresses a similar sentiment.

“Complex systems are not optimized by one magic fix but rather the accumulation of thousands of micro-advancements,” Anza Vice President of Core Engineering Brennan Watt wrote in the post.

Some of these micro-advancements include improving Agave’s scheduler, scaling Turbine (which is Solana’s block propagation protocol), and switching to a faster hashing algorithm for keeping data secure.