Solana Will Become A ‘Decentralized Nasdaq’ In | Crypto News
Delphi Digital is betting that Solana’s next major improve cycle will reposition the community as an “exchange grade” setting succesful of supporting onchain order books that can realistically contend with centralized venues on latency, liquidity depth, and market construction. In a Jan. 20 post on X titled “2026 is the Year of Solana”, the research firm argued Solana’s 2026 roadmap is its “most aggressive upgrade cycle” yet, one that “overhaul[s] everything from consensus to infrastructure to become the decentralized Nasdaq.”
Why Delphi Digital Calls 2026 “The Year Of Solana”
Delphi framed the roadmap less as a grab bag of efficiency enhancements and more as a capital-markets push: “Solana’s roadmap is about transforming it into an exchange grade environment where a native onchain CLOB can viably compete with CEX latency, liquidity depth, and fairness. Here are all the upgrades making this possible.” In that view, shaving milliseconds issues only insofar as it produces predictable, enforceable execution outcomes for purposes like high-frequency trading and central restrict order books.
The centerpiece, Delphi wrote, is Alpenglow, a consensus redesign it called “the most significant protocol level change in Solana’s history.” The firm said Alpenglow introduces a new structure constructed around Votor and Rotor, with Votor altering how validators attain settlement. Rather than “chaining multiple voting rounds together,” validators would combination votes offchain and “commit to finality in one or two rounds,” producing “theoretical finality in the 100-150 millisecond range, down from the original 12.8 seconds.”
Delphi emphasised Votor’s parallel finalization paths as a resilience characteristic, not just a velocity play. If a block will get “overwhelming support (80%+ stake)” it finalizes immediately; if help is between 60% and 80%, a second spherical triggers, and finality follows if that also clears 60%. The aim, Delphi argued, is to protect finality even with unresponsive segments of the community.
Alpenglow also introduces what Delphi called a “20+20” resilience model: security holds as long as no more than 20% of stake is malicious, while liveness persists even if another 20% is offline, “tolerat[ing] up to 40% of the network being either malicious or inactive while still maintaining finality.” Under this design, Proof of History is “effectively deprecated,” changed by deterministic slot scheduling and local timers. Delphi said the improve is anticipated to roll out in early to mid 2026.
Delphi also pointed to Firedancer, Jump’s C++ validator consumer, as a structural improve aimed at lowering a long-standing operational risk. Solana has traditionally relied on a single consumer, now recognized as Agave, and Delphi described that “monoculture” as a central weak spot because client-level faults can cascade into broader community halts.
Firedancer’s goal, Delphi said, is a deterministic, high-throughput engine that can course of “millions of TPS with minimal latency variance.” Ahead of full readiness, Delphi highlighted “Frankendancer,” a transitional construct that combines Firedancer’s networking and block manufacturing modules with Agave’s runtime and consensus parts, as a bridge to “substantially” elevated consumer range.
On infrastructure, Delphi spotlighted DoubleZero as a personal fiber overlay for validators, likening its transmission profile to conventional exchange connectivity: “the same infrastructure traditional exchanges like Nasdaq and CME rely on for microsecond level transmission.” The argument is that as validator units broaden, propagation variance turns into the enemy of tight finality home windows. By routing messages along “optimal paths” and supporting multicast supply, Delphi said DoubleZero can slim latency gaps across validators—an enabler for both Votor’s quorum formation and Rotor’s propagation design.
Delphi also framed Solana’s block-building roadmap as a market-structure project. It described Jito’s BAM (Block Assembly Marketplace) as separating ordering from execution via a market and privateness layer, with transactions ingested into TEEs so “neither validators nor builders can see raw transaction content before ordering takes effect,” lowering pre-execution habits like frontrunning.
Harmonic, meanwhile, targets builder competitors by introducing an open aggregation layer so validators can settle for proposals from “multiple competing builders in real time,” with Delphi summarizing: “Think of Harmonic as a meta-market and BAM as a micro-market.”
Raiku rounds out the thesis by including deterministic latency and programmable execution ensures adjoining to Solana’s validator set, utilizing Ahead-of-Time (AOT) transactions for pre-committed workflows and Just-in-Time (JIT) transactions for real-time wants—without modifying L1 consensus.
Delphi in the end tied the technical roadmap to market demand: Solana’s spot trading gravity, the consolidation of onchain perps toward a handful of venues, and the need to attain efficiency parity with centralized platforms. It cited expectations for “new Solana native perps like Bulk Trade coming early next year,” and pointed to merchandise like xStocks bringing “onchain equities directly to Solana,” arguing that liquidity and consideration are consolidating toward a chain with quicker settlement, better UX, and denser capital.
At press time, SOL traded at $127.
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