Solana Accelerate Day 1: Time to challenge assumptions

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As the Solana community descended on Pier 36 in New York for the Accelerate conference, the feeling in the air was one of reset expectations.

Propositions about Solana’s tech and investment prospects that seemed like consensus just six months ago have now gone out of style.

For one, there’s the muted impact of Firedancer. The Jump-developed client was once spoken of in quasi-religious terms by Solana fans. The software’s launch was going to let Solana hit one million transactions per second — a nice and round, if meaningless, figure.

A partial Firedancer implementation called Frankendancer is live but so far has struggled to gain adoption. Just 5% of Solana stake currently runs on the client. Firedancer is launching a stake delegation program similar to what the Solana Foundation offers for Agave, perhaps in hopes of growing its slice of the pie.

Jump’s head of R&D, Kevin Bowers, gave a talk to kick off Accelerate, but it was overshadowed by a talk from a different client developer: On Monday, Anza’s head of research Roger Wattenhofer gave a talk announcing Alpenglow, a major overhaul of Solana’s consensus protocol that could greatly reduce Solana’s latency.

In short, some in Solana’s validator community are finding, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, that the client they’ve been dreaming of has been here the whole time — in Agave.

I ran into Anza’s lead economist, Max Resnick, at Accelerate. He said the developer shop had to spend time pruning and ironing out bugs in the original Solana client’s code — longtime readers will remember last April, when it became difficult to land transactions on the network at all — before it could test out more frontier ideas like Alpenglow.

It also used to seem obvious to many in Solana-land that ETF approval was going to prove a major tailwind for the asset. That no longer seems to necessarily be the case, as MicroStrategy-like companies make major SOL treasury purchases.

Some investors made a lot of money by taking a non-consensus bet on SOL following the FTX collapse. Now, as the Solana network looks more consensus than before, conventional wisdom within the ecosystem is starting to be turned on its head.

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