1/ SIMD-0266: Efficient Token Program, authored by @0x_febo, propose replacing the current SPL token program with a new compute optimized version called p-token. The upgrade will reduce Token program CU usage by up to 98%. Here’s how it works 🧵 2/ Today, ~10% of block compute units are spent on Token program instructions. By cutting these costs to a fraction of current usage, p-token will free nearly 12% of block space for other transactions, directly increasing Solana’s effective throughput.

1/ Rotor is Solana’s new block propagation protocol introduced in the Alpenglow upgrade. It’s a single layer of relayers that replaces Turbine’s multi-hop, delivering blocks faster and more uniformly across the network 🧵 2/ How does Rotor work? The leader pipelines a block into slices, erasure-codes each slice into shreds, then sends each shred to a selected relayer. Relayers broadcast their shred to all validators globally in a single round.

1/ Introducing the largest Solana Protocol change ever: Alpenglow, Solana's new consensus protocol conceived by the Anza Research team. Say goodbye to Tower BFT and Proof of History. Say hello to Votor & Rotor 🧵👇 2/ Transaction final latency is coming down to 100-150ms (100x reduction), competitive with centralized infrastructure and enabling real time applications

1/ The blockchain world thrives on innovation, and Anza is taking on the challenge by forming a new research team: Anza Research 🧵👇

anza.xyz/blog/anza-rese… 2/ Founded by Professor Roger Wattenhoffer (@TheWattenhofer) and two of his PhD students @DiscoKobi and @qkniep from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, Anza Research will work on fundamental aspects of the protocol to bring Solana to the next level.

1/ Timelines and what to expect around what @anza_xyz is doing to address the current network congestion on @Solana in our validator client implementation, Agave.

The short version is: significant progress has been made to overcome the current congestion challenges, and we expect to begin releasing fixes next week. In collaboration with other core contributors, we have analyzed the root cause, and evaluated several potential changes. 2/ Having said that, today the Anza team will be testing a patch to address current network congestion. If successful, this patch will be readied for wider rollout.

1/ Here is a preview of the upcoming Agave v1.18 that will be released to mainnet in the next few weeks. It’s an incremental release that paves the way for Agave v2+. While not a silver bullet for current congestion issues, @anza_xyz devs and other core contributors are heads down working to resolve the issues impacting network usability. We’re on it. 2/ A highlight of Agave v1.18 is the addition of The Central Scheduler, which is disabled by default but can be enabled by including the “--block-production-method central-scheduler” flag.