Solana dev shop’s 2025 roadmap aims to optimize efficiency, double blockspace
“Micro-advancements” take center stage in plans by Anza
Akif CUBUK/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
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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.
Increasing Solana’s block limit gets the most airtime out of the improvements in the piece. Currently, Solana blocks can contain up to 48 million compute units. Watt says this block limit constrains Solana’s bandwidth, or the amount of data it can handle.
Raising the amount of CUs that can be packed into a block can makes it difficult for network participants to handle the load, so Anza is starting off with a modest block limit increase, from 48 million to 50 million CUs per block.
One piece of the Solana network that could struggle with higher block limits is the so-called read layer, which must take blockchain data and turn it into a format that programs can read.
The read layer is a widespread question for 2025. In a different sort of roadmap, the Solana Foundation’s head of product said Solana’s read layer “needs an overhaul” and teased improvements to come this year.
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