Delphi Digital is betting that Solana’s next major upgrade cycle will reposition the network as an “exchange grade” environment capable of supporting on-chain order books that can realistically compete with centralized locations in terms of latency, liquidity depth and market structure. In a January 20 post on[s] everything from consensus to infrastructure to become the decentralized Nasdaq.”
Why Delphi Digital calls 2026 “the year of Solana”.
Delphi framed the roadmap is less a grab bag of performance improvements and more like a push from the capital markets: “Solana’s roadmap is about transforming it into an exchange-quality environment where a native onchain CLOB can viably compete with CEX latency, liquidity depth, and fairness. Here are all the upgrades that make this possible.” In that perspective, cutting milliseconds only matters to the extent that it delivers predictable, enforceable execution results for applications like high-frequency trading and central limit order books.
The centerpiece, Delphi wrote, is Alpenglow, a consensus redesign that it called “the most significant protocol-level change in Solana history.” The company said Alpenglow is introducing a new architecture built around Votor and Rotor, with Votor changing the way validators reach agreement. Instead of “linking together multiple rounds of voting,” validators would collect votes off-chain and “commit to finality in one or two rounds,” yielding “theoretical finality in the 100-150 millisecond range, instead of the original 12.8 seconds.”
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Delphi highlighted Votor’s parallel finalization paths as a hallmark of resilience, and not just a speed game. If a block receives “overwhelming support (80%+ commitment),” it will be completed immediately; if support is between 60% and 80%, a second round is started, and finality follows if 60% is also reached. The goal, Delphi argued, is to maintain finality even if parts of the network are unresponsive.
Alpenglow also introduces what Delphi called a ’20+20′ resilience model: security persists as long as no more than 20% of the deployment is malicious, while liveliness persists even if another 20% are offline.[ing] up to 40% of the network is malicious or inactive, while still maintaining finality.” Under this design, Proof of History will be “effectively obsolete” and replaced with deterministic slot scheduling and local timers. Delphi said the upgrade is expected to be rolled out in early to mid-2026.
Delphi also pointed to Firedancer, Jump’s C++ validator client, as a structural upgrade aimed at mitigating a long-standing operational risk. Solana has traditionally relied on a single customer, now known as Agave, and Delphi described that “monoculture” as a central weakness, as customer-level errors can lead to broader network shutdowns.
The goal of Firedancer, Delphi said, is a high-throughput deterministic engine that can “handle millions of TPS with minimal latency variance.” Ahead of full readiness, Delphi highlighted “Frankendancer,” a transitional construct that combines Firedancer’s network and block production modules with Agave’s runtime and consensus components, as a bridge to “substantially” greater customer diversity.
On the infrastructure front, Delphi has highlighted DoubleZero as a private fiber overlay for validators, comparing its transmission profile to traditional exchange connectivity: “the same infrastructure that traditional exchanges like Nasdaq and CME rely on for microsecond-level transmission.” The argument is that as validator sets grow larger, propagation variance becomes the enemy of tight finality windows. By routing messages along “optimal paths” and supporting multicast delivery, DoubleZero can reduce latency differences between validators, according to Delphi – enabling both Votor’s quorum formation and Rotor’s propagation design.
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Delphi also formulated Solana’s block building roadmap as a market structure project. It described Jito’s BAM (Block Assembly Marketplace) as separating ordering and execution through a marketplace and privacy layer, recording transactions in TEEs so that “neither validators nor builders can see the raw transaction content before ordering takes effect,” reducing pre-execution behavior such as frontrunning.
Harmonic, meanwhile, is addressing builder competition by introducing an open aggregation layer so that validators can accept proposals from “multiple competing builders in real time,” with Delphi summarizing: “Think of Harmonic as a metamarket and BAM as a micromarket.”
Raiku rounds out the statement by adding deterministic latency and programmable execution guarantees in addition to Solana’s validator set, using Ahead-of-Time (AOT) transactions for pre-committed workflows and Just-in-Time (JIT) transactions for real-time needs – without changing the L1 consensus.
Delphi ultimately tied the tech roadmap to market demand: Solana’s gravity in the spot market, the consolidation of onchain perps into a handful of locations, and the need to achieve performance parity with centralized platforms. It cited expectations for “new Solana-native perps like Bulk Trade coming early next year” and pointed to products like xStocks that “bring onchain shares directly to Solana,” arguing that liquidity and attention are consolidating toward a chain with faster settlement, better UX, and denser capital.
At the time of writing, SOL was trading at $127.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com