Max Resnick, former Ethereum champion, specs out plan to transform Solana

Max Resnick, the one-time Ethereum champion turned sour, said his new preferred blockchain, Solana, was never meant to "compete" with Ethereum. Instead, he said Solana has always had its sights much higher.

"From day one, [Solana] was designed to compete with the New York Stock Exchange, with NASDAQ, with the CME, with all these centralized venues that are getting tons and tons of volume," Resnick, now the lead economist at key Solana development group Anza, said during his keynote on the second day of Solana’s Accelerate conference in New York City.

Resnick’s 15-minute speech was about just that: turning Solana into a true "decentralized NASDAQ," a sort of rallying cry for Solana fans in the same way that Ethereans want to create "the world computer."

Today, Resnick noted, Visa achieves about 7,400 transactions per second and Nasdaq about 70,000 TPS. Solana, depending on the day, can process upwards of 4,500 TPS — good, but not quite where it should be, he added.

So, how do you create a decentralized network that competes with centralized exchanges on trading volumes, spreads, and performance metrics? On Monday, Anza researchers unveiled a plan to fundamentally overhaul the high-performance blockchain. The effort, called Alpenglow, would essentially rewrite Solana's consensus logic.

"Alpenglow is not only a new consensus protocol, but the biggest change to Solana's core protocol since, well, ever," Anza wrote. "It means Solana can compete with Web2 infrastructure in terms of responsiveness, potentially making blockchain technology viable for entirely new categories of applications that demand real-time performance."

The goal, Resnick, a former member of the Consensys subsidiary Special Mechanisms Group, said Tuesday, is ultimately to reach a "round-trip" transaction confirmation time of around 150 milliseconds. "That's an unbelievably low number for a worldwide L1 blockchain protocol," Anza wrote in Monday's white paper.

While much more research and development has to be done, Resnick noted, he also gave a little insight into what Anza is thinking. Notably, Anza is trying to figure out a way to "pipeline" consensus using a "multi-leader system" that can vote on multiple blocks concurrently.

"We're going to be doing consensus on many different blocks at the same time," he said. "And hopefully, eventually, once every 20 milliseconds, we'll be popping out a new block, or maybe not just one block, but a set of blocks from multiple concurrent leaders. And this is a simplification of what this is eventually going to look like."

When he left the world of Ethereum in December to join the Solana Labs spinout Anza, Resnick gave himself 100 days to spec out as many improvements as he could for Solana. He noted Tuesday that a more detailed paper is in the works for publication soon.