Anza

Anza is the software company that builds the core of the Solana blockchain. Its main product is Agave, the validator client most of the network runs. A validator client is the program a node runs to check transactions and vote on blocks. Former Solana Labs staff started Anza in January 2024 and took over the code Solana Labs wrote. Anza also designed Alpenglow, Solana's new way of agreeing on blocks. It went live in October 2026, and Anza says blocks now become final in about 150 milliseconds instead of 12.8 seconds. Anza makes free tools for app builders too, such as Pinocchio and Solana Kit. It has no token, and no link to other brands and places that share the name.

How Anza ships changes to Solana

Anza writes open-source code, and the people who run Solana's nodes choose to install it. Nothing Anza ships can change Solana on its own. A change takes hold only when enough nodes run the new release and the feature is switched on.

The path has three steps. First, the change is written up as a Solana Improvement Document, or SIMD. This is a public proposal that other teams can read and push back on. Next, Anza builds the change into an Agave release behind a "feature gate", a switch that is off by default. Last, the gate is turned on, first on the test networks and then on mainnet. Every node applies the change at the same moment, at the start of an epoch.

The slot-time cut shows how this plays out. SIMD-0525 halved the time between blocks from 400ms to 200ms in four 50ms steps, each gated separately. Anza confirmed the last step went live on mainnet on 9 October 2026, as covered in our report on the 200ms activation.

Anza publishes release schedules, patch notes and planned cluster restarts on its blog and in its GitHub repositories, so operators can plan upgrades ahead of time. New releases reach mainnet in stages: Anza asks volunteers to move 10% of stake to a release candidate, then 20%, and only then recommends it for everyone.

Agave validator client: versions, requirements and setup

Agave is the original Solana validator software, now kept up by Anza. It is written in Rust and is free to use. Anza calls it "Solana's majority validator client". Anyone can download it and run a node.

Anza forked the Solana Labs code into its own repository on 2 March 2024, and development has happened in anza-xyz/agave since then. The main program is called agave-validator, alongside tools such as agave-ledger-tool and agave-install.

Releases in 2026 have moved quickly:

• Agave 4.0, a mainnet upgrade candidate in May 2026, made XDP networking ready for production. XDP is a Linux feature that lets a validator forward block data without the usual operating-system overhead. Anza's 4.0 patch notes say it cut the retransmit step from about 600ms to under 1ms. The release also removed UDP transaction ingestion in favour of QUIC.
• Agave 4.2, with mainnet feature activations from 17 August 2026, carried the 200ms slot time, a 90% rent cut and larger transactions, according to the Solana Foundation's 4.2 release overview.
• Agave 4.3 carried the Alpenglow migration. Anza made v4.3.2 the recommended release for all mainnet validators on 16 October 2026, five days before the switch.
• Agave 4.4 was tagged as a mainnet release candidate (v4.4.0-rc.1) on 27 October 2026. Anza's tentative schedule recommends it for general use from 2 November, with its mainnet feature activations starting on 9 November. The release notes include Alpenglow and Proof of History fixes and raise the limit on transactions from unstaked connections.

In October 2026 Anza also split cargo-build-sbf, the tool that compiles Solana programs, out of the Solana CLI. It said the tool will now "ship on their own schedule, not Agave's", and developers install it with cargo install cargo-build-sbf.

If you want to run Agave, the hardware requirements are heavy. Anza's docs ask for a CPU with a 2.8GHz base clock and SHA extensions, separate NVMe drives of 1TB or more for accounts and for the ledger, and a 10 Gbps connection for staked nodes (2 Gbps is the minimum). Ubuntu 24.04 is the main supported system. Install and upgrade guides live at docs.anza.xyz.

Is Alpenglow live? Anza's 150ms finality upgrade

Yes. Alpenglow is the new set of rules Anza designed for how Solana agrees on blocks, and it replaced TowerBFT on mainnet on 21 October 2026. Anza announced that it was live at 13:54 UTC that day, with finality "reduced from 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds". Finality is the point after which a payment cannot be undone. The switch happened at slot 459,653,000, as covered in our report on the mainnet activation. Galaxy, which ran validators through the change, puts TowerBFT's finality nearer six seconds once slots had dropped to 200ms, so the real gain depends on which baseline you use.

Anza's Alpenglow page describes three main changes:

• Votor finalises a block in one round of voting if validators holding 80% of stake respond, or in two rounds at 60%. Whichever path finishes first wins.
• Votes move off-chain. Validators stop sending a vote transaction for every block and instead exchange signed messages that combine into one compact certificate. That frees block space for users. Galaxy reports that validators now pay a flat fee of 0.8 SOL per epoch to take part, in place of per-vote fees, which it says is less than half what voting used to cost.
• The network is designed to keep running with 20% of stake acting maliciously and a further 20% offline at the same moment.

Because vote transactions no longer appear in blocks, charts of total Solana transactions show a sharp drop from 21 October 2026. That is a change in what gets counted, not a fall in use.

The upgrade had a long run-up. Anza researchers presented Alpenglow in May 2025. It went live on testnet on 24 September 2026 and on devnet a day later. Anza's January roadmap had targeted the third quarter of 2026, so mainnet came a few weeks late. In its launch statement, chief executive Brennan Watt said Anza "took it from a white paper to running on mainnet in under 18 months".

Only half of the design has shipped. Rotor, the second part, is planned to replace Turbine, the system that spreads block data across the network. Anza's statement lists Rotor, leader rotation that takes geography into account, and Quantumglow as next steps, none with a committed date.

Solana rent reduction, block limits and the Anza26 roadmap

Anza sets out its plans for the year in a roadmap called Anza26. The goals are a faster network, more room in each block, and less work for the people who run nodes and build apps. Three items from Agave 4.2 have reached mainnet or are under way:

• Rent, the SOL deposit every account must hold to stay on-chain, is being cut by 90% under SIMD-0437. The cut is split across five feature gates. The first step went live in early September 2026 and the second followed. As of 28 October 2026 the last three steps had not activated and were expected during the Agave 4.4 cycle.
• A new transaction format (SIMD-0296) raises the maximum transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes, which lets apps fit more instructions and larger proofs into one atomic transaction.
• Slot times fell from 400ms to 200ms under SIMD-0525.

Other items have not shipped yet. The roadmap lists bigger blocks, with a limit of 100 million compute units. In October 2026 Brennan Watt proposed raising the limit from 50 million back to 100 million in five steps of 10 million, now that 200ms slots were stable. It was still a discussion, not a formal SIMD, when proposed. The biggest open item is Multiple Concurrent Proposers, or MCP. On Solana, one validator at a time picks the order of transactions in a block. MCP would let several validators add transactions to the same slot, which Anza says would break that "single leader monopoly". A third item, Block Revenue Distribution (SIMD-0123), changes how validators track and share the fees they earn.

Anza developer tools: Pinocchio, Solana Kit, Codama and P-Token

Anza maintains open-source libraries that Solana app developers use every day. They are free, and most of them aim to make programs cheaper to run or easier to call from an app.

• Pinocchio is a minimal Rust library for writing on-chain programs that use as little compute as possible.
• P-Token is a rewrite of the SPL Token program built with Pinocchio. Anza's Agave 4.0 notes estimate it frees roughly 12% of block capacity network-wide.
• Solana Kit is the JavaScript and TypeScript SDK for building apps. Version 7, released in July 2026, added React hooks and transaction introspection.
• Codama generates client code and standard interface descriptions from a program.
• Wincode is a fast serializer for Rust that is compatible with bincode. Agave uses it in performance-critical paths.
• SBPF is the virtual machine that runs Solana programs. Anza published a migration guide to the SBPFv3 bytecode format in September 2026.
• cargo-build-sbf compiles programs for that virtual machine. Since October 2026 it ships on its own, apart from the Solana CLI.

Anza's GitHub organisation also holds a Mollusk test harness for programs and the compiler toolchain used to build them.

Anza Research, Quantumglow and post-quantum work

Anza has a research group that works next to its engineers. Its recent papers ask what a powerful quantum computer would mean for Solana, and how the network could stay safe from one.

In April 2026 Anza published "Securing Solana Against a Powerful Quantum Adversary". In July 2026 it followed with Quantumglow, which Anza calls "a post-quantum adaptation of Alpenglow". We explain the design in our report on the Quantumglow proposal. Anza lists Quantumglow as a next step after Alpenglow, but it has no date to ship.

For Anza's own summary of its priorities, see our write-up of Anza's State of the Network talk from Breakpoint in December 2025.

Who Anza and Agave are for

Anza's work matters most to three groups, and most people who use Solana never deal with Anza directly.

People who run nodes are the direct users. If you run a validator or an RPC node, you most likely run Agave or a client built on it, and Anza's release dates set your upgrade plans. The limits are cost and time. The hardware is costly, new releases come often, and a node left on an old version can fall off the network.

Developers use Anza's libraries whether or not they know the name. If you are writing a program where compute cost matters, Pinocchio is aimed at you. If you are building a web app, Solana Kit is the SDK to start from. Apps that waited several seconds to treat a payment as settled can now rely on much faster finality.

Stakers and token holders are affected indirectly. You cannot stake with Anza or buy into it. What you can do is check which client and version your validator runs, since a validator that upgrades late, or runs a version with a known bug, may miss rewards. You can compare validators by commission, uptime and software version on Solana Compass.

Is Agave safe? Bug bounty, security patches and client concentration risk

The main risk with Anza is that so much depends on one team's code. Most of Solana's stake runs Agave or software built from it. A bad bug in Agave could stall the network or split it in two. Careful work lowers that risk, but it cannot remove it.

Four facts help you weigh it.

First, the clients are less independent than the names suggest. Jito-Solana, the client maintained by Jito JTO$0.338-7.8%, is a fork of Agave. Frankendancer, the hybrid client from Jump Crypto, paired its own networking with Agave's execution and consensus code. A flaw in that shared code affects all of them.

Second, Alpenglow narrowed client choice during the switch. Validators were asked to run an Agave-based client through the migration. Galaxy reports that Firedancer operators could fail over to Agave and return afterwards, because Firedancer's 26.10 release supports Alpenglow, but that Frankendancer is not supported once Alpenglow is active. Galaxy also notes that slashing, the penalty for misbehaving validators, was "deliberately not enabled in the first iteration".

Third, new code brings new bugs. Marinade MNDE$0.022-5.5% reported that Agave 4.3.2 nodes skipped about half of their first leader slots each epoch after the switch, while Firedancer nodes did not. A Proof of History fix that Marinade links to the problem is in Agave v4.4.0-rc.1, as covered in our report on the skipped slots. Anza had not publicly confirmed the cause when we reported it.

Fourth, security problems do occur and have so far been fixed before anyone used them. Two flaws were reported privately to Anza in December 2025: one could crash a validator through the gossip network, and the other let an attacker block a validator's votes. Anza's patch summary says they were fixed in v3.0.14 together with the Firedancer and Jito teams and the Solana Foundation, with "no known attack on the cluster".

Agave has a standing bug bounty. Its security policy offers up to 25,000 SOL for a loss-of-funds bug and up to 12,500 SOL for a consensus safety violation, paid by the Solana Foundation in SOL locked for 12 months. A separate Alpenglow competition in August 2026 offered a pool of up to 50,000 SOL, according to Helius's Agave 4.2 review. Anza's launch statement says Alpenglow also went through red-teaming, penetration testing and repeated migration rehearsals. It names no outside audit firm.

There is no custody risk in the usual sense. Anza does not hold user funds, and it has no on-chain program that it alone can upgrade. Protocol changes take effect only when validators adopt a release and a feature gate activates.

Agave vs Firedancer, Jito-Solana and Frankendancer

Agave is the main Solana client, and Jito-Solana and Frankendancer are built partly from its code. Firedancer is the only one that stands fully apart. Jump Crypto wrote it from scratch in C.

Here is how the four differ:

• Agave is Anza's Rust client, descended from the original Solana Labs code. New protocol features, including Alpenglow, usually arrive here first.
• Jito-Solana is Agave with extra code for MEV, the additional income validators earn from how transactions are ordered. It follows Agave's version numbers closely.
• Frankendancer combined Firedancer's networking and block production with Agave's execution and consensus. Galaxy reports it is not supported now that Alpenglow is active.
• Firedancer shares no code with Agave. That independence is the point: a bug in one client is unlikely to exist in the other. Its 26.10 release supports Alpenglow.

If you run a node, the choice comes down to a trade-off. Agave gets each new feature first. A second codebase makes the whole network safer, because one bug cannot take down every node. Alpenglow shows both sides: the switch itself ran on Agave-based clients, while the skipped-slot bug that followed hit Agave nodes and not Firedancer ones.

Does Anza have a token? ANZA price searches explained

Anza has no token. Its website and docs list no token, no airdrop and no points scheme. Anza is a private company, and Fortune reported that a Solana Foundation grant paid for its launch.

A search for an "Anza price" leads to tokens that borrow the name. One "ANZA" token shown in the Phantom wallet copies the text Anza uses to describe itself, but Phantom flags that token as unverified. No token with the Anza name has been announced by Anza, and the same goes for tokens using the Alpenglow name.

Anza founders, CEO, funding and history

A group that left Solana Labs together founded Anza. Its launch announcement of 30 January 2024 names Jeff Washington, Stephen Akridge, Jed Halfon, Amber Christiansen, Pankaj Garg and Jon Cinque among the founding team. Stephen Akridge was a co-founder of Solana Labs. Brennan Watt is chief executive: he wrote in the Anza26 post of January 2026 that "starting this year, I've stepped into the CEO role at Anza".

Fortune reported at launch that about half of Solana Labs' roughly 100 staff moved to Anza. It described Anza as an "employee-owned, for-profit" business funded by a grant from the Solana Foundation, with Solana Labs keeping a 13% stake. The same article quoted critics who called the split "decentralization theater", since the same engineers kept working on the same code under a new name.

Key dates since then:

• 30 January 2024: Anza is announced.
• 2 March 2024: Anza forks the Solana Labs validator into the Agave repository.
• May 2025: Anza researchers present Alpenglow.
• January 2026: Anza publishes the Anza26 roadmap, Brennan Watt takes over as CEO, and Anza says the network had "zero downtime" in the previous year.
• 24 and 25 September 2026: Alpenglow goes live on testnet and devnet.
• 9 October 2026: 200ms slots go live on mainnet.
• 21 October 2026: Alpenglow goes live on mainnet, replacing TowerBFT.