What is Anza?
Anza is the engineering outfit behind Solana's main validator client, Agave, and the SPL token programs that support most of the network's assets. This company broke away from Solana Labs at the beginning of 2024, and it took most of the core protocol developers along with it. If you're ever puzzled by who writes the code that validators actually run, know that Anza plays a key role in the answer.
Consider a municipal department of public works. Sure, people commute daily and businesses rely on these roads, but there's a dedicated team of engineers who lay fresh pavement, upgrade bridges, and re-engineer intersections. Most of the time their work goes completely unnoticed until it suddenly makes a major difference in a community. Anza fulfills this exact role for Solana. Apps like Phantom and Jupiter serve as the traffic, but Anza is the entity responsible for keeping the pavement smooth and durable.
What Does Anza Actually Do?
First up is Agave, the core validator software. In the late 2025 period, Anza launched version 3.0 of Agave, which introduced XDP networking — a Linux function that enables a machine to interact with packets directly from its network card. This function served as the necessary foundation for Solana to increase the amount of compute allowed per block from 60 million to 100 million units as outlined by Solana Improvement Document (SIMD) 0286. After Agave 3, Anza rolled out Agave 4.x throughout 2026, and their future development roadmap now centers on 200-millisecond slots. For context, Solana's slots are currently 400-milliseconds each. They're also focusing on larger transactions in this next phase.
Alpenglow is the next big upgrade on the horizon. Anza designed and launched Solana's next generation consensus, a replacement for the current TowerBFT plus Proof-of-History consensus that Solana uses today. The consensus upgrade consists of two new components: Votor, a new and improved voting protocol; and Rotor, a new and improved distribution layer. Validators approved this consensus upgrade in September of 2025, with more than 98% of stake voting in favor of it. Alpenglow entered community testing mode in May 2026, and will begin live operations (aka mainnet activation) in late 2026. One of its main selling points? A 150 millisecond finality time. Finality means the period when a block of data has become immutable. In other words, when a transaction is considered final by the network.
In addition to these client and consensus upgrades, Anza authors several of the proposed Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs). SIMD 204, for example, introduced the slashing mechanism that enables stakers to penalize and ultimately eject validators if they behave maliciously. Anza has also submitted several other proposals, each of which aim to reduce the rent fee. The rent fee is a small deposit that accounts must make in order to exist on the Solana network.
How Anza Compares to Ethereum's Core Development Model
Ethereum has always had a very decentralized approach to its core development process. Multiple entities, including the Ethereum Foundation, are responsible for Ethereum's development. While some entities have more control than others over how Ethereum is built, no single organization dictates how Ethereum is developed. Additionally, independent teams (from Nethermind, for instance) run their own validator clients, while other organizations (like Besu from the Hyperledger community) work separately as well. Since multiple parties contribute to Ethereum and there is not just one developer behind Ethereum's code, it takes several years for upgrades to be made. Ethereum's hard forks tend to only occur on a yearly basis.
Solana is different: Anza has control of the client that, including Jito, comprises about 75% of stake as of mid-2026. Also, since Anza developed Solana's next consensus protocol and validators have ratified it, Anza plays a more prominent role in Solana's development process. This does make it possible to roll out upgrades relatively quickly, which is exactly what has happened with Alpenglow, whose rollout from idea to activation was completed within several months. This is a timescale that would be near-impossible with Ethereum's approach.
The flipside of this is that Anza's priorities and budget and bug history become all the more important. This is why other validators and client providers, such as Jito, are critical to the health of Solana and why Firedancer's development from Jump Crypto is so important to Solana's success.
Why Is Anza Important?
At the very least, Anza is effectively responsible for Solana's roadmap. But the roadmap also has implications for you. Imagine that you've staked your SOL, letting Marinade do it for you, and have secured a 6-8% APY on your deposits today. Then the Alpenglow upgrade arrives at the end of 2026. You've done nothing special. You've simply waited, and your deposits still have the same 6-8% APY. But behind the scenes, the validators that your stake is supporting will now be using the Votor algorithm instead of TowerBFT and PoH. The blocks on Solana will be confirmed within a fraction of a second and the time to wait for the finality of a transaction before it's complete will be reduced from 24 hours to milliseconds. This, in turn, will reduce your exchange's ability to verify incoming transfers because of how much faster they're finalized.
This all comes from the client. And that, in turn, came from Anza. Anza is also responsible for the consensus mechanism. It will be the entity responsible for the future of Solana as well.
The development process at Anza has been a thorn in the side of Solana skeptics who have been closely monitoring the question of its degree of centralization. There are thousands of validator nodes on Solana. So how much of an argument against the validity of this network can you make if one organization is writing most of its development code (or if one organization was spun out of one of the entities responsible for its existence)? If you believe this network needs to be decentralized, you should be asking yourself: how quickly is the power of Anza declining? Check the amount of stake the validators running Firedancer have, see how many non-Anza authors of the next SIMD are being proposed, watch how willing validators are to vote down proposals if there are bugs in them, and you'll have your answer.
Did Anza Create Solana?
While Anza has a hand in the network's development, they didn't build Solana from the ground up. Solana Labs launched the chain in 2020, and Anza was formed when its core engineering team split off the following year.
