Five weeks from now, the Solana ecosystem will once again gather for Breakpoint (this time in Abu Dhabi), the marquee annual event that captures the network’s twelve-month progress and what’s next for the upcoming year. This year’s conference arrives at a pivotal moment for Solana, following the launch of the first SOL ETFs that capped off a year defined by widespread ecosystem growth, performance upgrades, and institutional adoption.
At RockawayX, we have spent these months running validators, expanding physical network infrastructure, backing the teams pushing Solana forward, and much more. This year, we launched whysolana.com: our vision of where the network is heading next and why Wall Street should consider SOL to be an essential crypto-based investment asset.
As we now begin the final countdown to Breakpoint, we are highlighting five advancements that define Solana’s 2025, each a key milestone on the road to achieving the vision of Internet Capital Markets.
DoubleZero: Physical Infrastructure for Global Performance
When DoubleZero launched its mainnet on October 2, it formally introduced physical infrastructure as a new dimension of performance to Solana. While software upgrades have pushed the limits of block production and consensus, they’ve now largely reached a point of diminishing returns; Solana’s primary limitation is how it runs on the internet.
Based on the premise that blockchains, like Big Tech giants, should operate on their own private internet highways, DoubleZero establishes a low-latency, high-bandwidth network built from fiber optic cables that span across oceans and continents, drastically raising Solana’s performance ceiling by enabling software advancements to reach their full potential.
This architecture minimizes propagation delay, reduces congestion, and creates a meshed communication layer for consensus-critical data. Since mainnet launch, the network’s Total Connected Value (TCV) has reached roughly $28 billion, representing about 33.9% of Solana’s activity operating through DoubleZero.
Perhaps one of the most important implications of the mainnet launch is that DoubleZero stands to address Solana's transaction duplication problem via filtering. The TL;DR on this is:
- During market volatility, Solana's validators get overwhelmed by bots flooding the network with duplicate transactions as they spam transactions, trying to get theirs through in order to gain an edge in arbitrage or liquidation.
- This can cause network throughput to plummet in some cases. Overall, it wastes computation and bandwidth on transactions that never confirm.
- Stake-Weighted Quality of Service (SWQoS) has been a partial mitigation to the issue.
The filtering uses Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). These are programmable hardware devices deployed at key network edge ingress points. Commercially available FPGA appliances can handle orders of magnitude more traffic than validators, performing spam removal, deduplication, and signature verification. One sample deployment alone can process multiple Gbps of inbound data: up to a million transactions per second with zero latency.
With DoubleZero’s filtering mechanism, an additional filter would be implemented that prevents duplicates from ever reaching leading validators. In doing so, DoubleZero could help ensure that genuine, unique transactions are relayed to leaders, while redundant spam gets pruned out much sooner, preserving network throughput and stability during high-stress periods.
DoubleZero’s mainnet launch followed the July unveiling of DoubleZero’s 3 million SOL Delegation Program, designed to expand access to enterprise-grade validator infrastructure in underrepresented regions. By delegating stake to operators located away from existing high-density clusters, the program helps decentralize Solana’s validator network while improving global throughput. It ensures performance is no longer tied to geography, giving validators around the world the same ability to compete on equal footing.
At RockawayX, we are proud to support that vision as both investors and active collaborators. We operate a RockawayX × DoubleZero co-branded validator in Prague, powered by Firedancer and Jito clients, designed to deliver the highest level of reliability and efficiency. Earlier this year, we also became the first European contributor to the DoubleZero network, linking Prague and Frankfurt through a dedicated 10G fiber line and deploying validator-facing endpoints to monitor live routing behavior under real conditions. As a part of our work with Solmate, we’re leading efforts to build a custom, DoubleZero-powered, bare metal Solana validator in Abu Dhabi to establish a premium staking option in the Middle East.
Agave 3.0: Scaling Solana's Network Performance
The Agave 3.0 validator client went live on mainnet in October, delivering faster transaction processing, better scheduler design, and clearer protocol standards, making Solana more efficient and reliable than ever before.
In achieving these improvements, the update introduced a series of architectural refinements including a rebuilt caching layer, faster startup times, and a new scheduler data model that together improve validator efficiency, stability, and throughput across the network. At the heart of the release is a complete overhaul of the program cache, which eliminates hundreds of superfluous account lookups per transaction batch.
This structural refinement delivers approximately 30–40% faster transaction processing in internal benchmarks, marking one of the most significant performance improvements in Agave's history.
The release contained several other key updates.
TransactionView
TransactionView is a new lightweight data structure. In contrast to the older SDK transaction types, which had to deserialize data and perform multiple memory allocations, TransactionView takes a different approach. It reads serialized transactions directly, parsing and caching their metadata without ever having to actually deserialize them.
Validator Startup Performance
Agave 3.0 reduced validator startup times from snapshot archives to under three and a half minutes, which is less than half the duration required under Agave 2.2. Nodes now rejoin consensus significantly faster after crashes, upgrades, or maintenance.
Additionally, the default snapshot interval was extended to every 100,000 slots (up from 50,000 in v2.3 and 25,000 in v2.2), which significantly improves disk performance by reducing IOPS spikes during snapshot creation. This not only makes validator operations more stable, but also reduces hardware strain during snapshot operations.
RPC Performance (Real-Time Update Focus)
The subscription server now prioritizes incoming messages, such as subscription requests and PINGs, over outgoing notifications. This reordering makes WebSocket connections more responsive, which is vital for applications that rely on PubSub for account updates, program logs, or slot notifications. Slot properties were added to epoch rewards error data, giving developers better visibility when debugging reward-related issues.
Agave 3.0 has also put in place SIMD-0083, the feature allows block entries to include conflicting transactions, executing them sequentially in order. This improvement simplifies transaction packing and removes a notable limitation in Solana's runtime. While the immediate effect is better efficiency, the deeper significance lies in how it prepares Solana for asynchronous execution. Once live, that architecture should allow independent transactions to be processed more efficiently in parallel.
Notably, SIMD-0186 will activate during the 3.0 release cycle, standardizing how validators calculate loaded transaction data sizes. This makes sure all clients arrive at the same values, preventing inconsistencies that could break consensus.
Under the new rules, each loaded account is counted exactly once. Programs using the BPF Upgradeable Loader include their associated program data, and Address Lookup Tables add a flat 8,248 bytes each.
SIMD-0268 also raises the Cross-Program Invocation (CPI) nesting limit from 4 to 8, effectively doubling how many times programs can call each other in a single transaction. This is crucial for complex protocols like perpetual swaps, smart wallets, and cross-margin systems that rely on deep program interactions.
Alpenglow: A New Era of Consensus
In August, the Solana validator community approved SIMD-0326, known as the Alpenglow upgrade, with near-unanimous support. The proposal received roughly 98 percent “yes” votes, underscoring how transformative it is for the network’s core consensus design.
Alpenglow is a coordinated rearchitecture of Solana’s block production, propagation, and consensus systems designed to push transaction finality below one second. While the network continues to use Proof-of-Stake as its foundation, Alpenglow replaces the legacy Proof-of-History and TowerBFT mechanisms with a new system called Votor. Under Votor, validators broadcast their votes to all nodes, with multicast capabilities on networks like DoubleZero helping to relay messages efficiently. Each node independently aggregates the votes in a local "Pool" data structure, and once the threshold is met, generates certificates that finalize blocks with far less back-and-forth communication, reducing latency and bandwidth overhead.
Alpenglow achieves its gains through three primary innovations. Microsliced block production allows leaders to begin streaming out portions of a block as soon as they are assembled, rather than waiting for the entire block to complete. Single-hop broadcast leverages stake-weighted relayers, high-bandwidth validators capable of sending data directly to all peers, to eliminate slow propagation paths. And two-round fast finality introduces a BLS-based voting cadence in which validators issue pre-commit and final-commit votes. Once 80% of total stake signs off, a block is considered finalized, cutting economic finality from roughly 12 seconds to well under one second in typical conditions.
In testing, 95% of stake has finalized within 150 to 270 milliseconds, with median times around 115 milliseconds, representing an order-of-magnitude improvement over previous epochs. This enables near-instant confirmation for users and applications, narrowing the latency gap between decentralized and centralized systems. The network now requires fewer redundant votes to confirm a block, reducing bandwidth use while improving reliability during congestion.
For developers, Alpenglow unlocks real-time DeFi, gaming, and trading experiences that depend on deterministic speed. For validators, it delivers a simpler, more efficient participation model with fewer wasted cycles and tighter synchronization. Together, these changes mark the beginning of sub-second consensus on Solana, a milestone once considered out of reach for open, permissionless networks.
ZK Compression v2: Scaling for Millions of Users
In May, Solana activated ZK Compression v2 on mainnet, marking a quiet but critical leap forward in how data is stored and verified on-chain.
ZK Compression applies zero-knowledge proofs to compress account data, reducing the storage footprint required for large-scale applications. Instead of saving every account’s full state directly on-chain, the network stores only compact cryptographic fingerprints (Merkle tree roots) that can verify the same information with far less space and compute.
The result is a dramatic reduction in the cost of maintaining large user bases. For applications with millions of accounts, such as social platforms, gaming ecosystems, or consumer reward programs, the per-user storage requirements drop by orders of magnitude. Developers can onboard users without facing the prohibitive storage/rent costs that typically constrain growth on high-throughput chains.
ZK Compression v2 also preserves composability. Compressed accounts remain fully interoperable with the rest of the network, allowing them to interact seamlessly with smart contracts, tokens, and DeFi protocols.
Firedancer: Lifting the Compute Ceiling (SIMD-0370 Proposal)
In late September, the Firedancer team from Jump Crypto introduced SIMD-0370, a proposal that could fundamentally reshape Solana’s performance ceiling. The change, which developers suggested would follow the deployment of the Alpenglow upgrade, would remove the fixed 60 million compute-unit cap that currently limits how much work can fit inside each block.
Under the existing model, each block has a static compute budget that acts as a safety measure to prevent validators from being overloaded. SIMD-0370 would make that ceiling dynamic, allowing block producers to include as many transactions as their hardware can handle. In effect, Solana’s throughput could scale alongside improvements in validator performance rather than being held back by a software-imposed limit.
The timing of this proposal is significant. With the Alpenglow upgrade accelerating block finalization and ZK Compression v2 reducing state size, removing the compute cap would allow each block to carry far greater economic activity. Together, these advancements would create a system that is faster and more elastic, capable of expanding capacity without breaking composability.
Supporters believe this flexibility could make Solana more resilient during periods of high demand, such as token launches or DeFi surges, by reducing congestion and failed transactions. Others have noted that current blocks are rarely full, meaning the impact may not be immediate, but the proposal lays the groundwork for future scaling. For developers, it promises more room for sophisticated applications and higher on-chain concurrency. For validators, it introduces new considerations around performance and resource allocation while translating hardware improvements directly into network throughput.
Toward a Unified, Global Solana
The five covered advancements collectively define Solana’s transition into mature, global financial infrastructure without sacrificing its core strengths of speed, security, and composability.
At RockawayX, our commitment is to the builders, validators, and researchers who make this progress possible. We invest in the teams expanding what Solana can achieve, operate the infrastructure that keeps it resilient, and help shape the long-term architecture of the network.
As Breakpoint 2025 approaches, these breakthroughs serve as both a reflection of how far the ecosystem has come and a preview of what lies ahead. The next chapter of Solana’s growth will not be defined by a single upgrade, but by the seamless collaboration between software, hardware, and the global community that continues to build on it.
