Anza CEO Brennan Watt sat down with Genfinity host Ryan Solomon days after Alpenglow went live on Solana mainnet. Anza builds Agave, the validator client behind most of the network. Watt walked through why 150-millisecond finality matters, how his team managed the launch risk, and what comes next. The roadmap includes Rotor, a new block propagation protocol, and a plan to make the network geographically aware. His comments also show how Anza views Solana’s competitive position as new chains keep launching.
I just interviewed the team behind the largest consensus upgrade in the history of Solana. 150ms finality is wild. @anza_xyz @bw_solana https://t.co/3O8ixx9IuM
— King Solomon (Ryan Solomon) (@IOV_OWL) October 27, 2026
Why 150 Milliseconds Changes Product Design
Alpenglow cut Solana’s transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds, according to The Block. Watt opened by putting that number in human terms. “That’s faster than the blink of an eye,” he said. He argued the speed matters most for financial products, where slow settlement shapes every design decision. Legacy systems force developers to show a spinning wheel or a progress bar, and Watt called that a killer for user experience.
The alternative is just as costly. Developers can hide the fact that funds have not settled, but that approach makes software more complicated, more bug prone, and slower to build. Faster finality removes that tradeoff. Watt also framed the benefit as a numbers game for builders. “We don’t always know which financial products are going to take off,” he said. Easier development therefore gives entrepreneurs more shots on goal to find product-market fit.
Solomon connected the idea to a scenario Anatoly Yakovenko has described before. A ship carrying millions of iPhones sinks, and markets must reprice Apple stock as fast as the news travels. Watt agreed with the premise. He said the future of finance is “tap, tap, go,” and that friction from human gatekeepers or long settlement times crushes the experience. Permissionless networks like Solana compress that back-end infrastructure and settle transactions atomically. Meanwhile, Alpenglow brings latency close to the physical limit for a global network, even for nodes sitting next to that sunken vessel.
Shipping a Consensus Upgrade on a Live Network
Solomon pointed out that Anza changed the consensus layer of a network securing more than $50 billion in assets. Watt said the word “live” defines the challenge. Building a new consensus mechanism is hard on its own. Building it while other teams ship features on top of the old one is harder. Anza spent about a year developing Alpenglow while keeping the legacy mechanism, Tower BFT, functional and safe.
That dual track created a compatibility burden. Watt explained that Anza did not want developers waiting 12 to 18 months for a long chain of dependent features. Instead, new features had to work under both consensus systems. “You just eat the cost,” he said, so innovations could keep moving independently. This approach kept the rest of the roadmap on schedule while the consensus work continued in parallel.
The harder question was readiness. Watt described the pressure of deciding when testing and auditing were sufficient. Launching too early and failing badly could amount to an extinction event for the network. However, he argued that freezing development out of fear carries its own danger. Teams that never take big swings, in his view, start a slow death spiral. “I’d rather die the slow death than the fast death” is the logic he sees in leaders who default to caution. He believes bold leaders must build a plan that minimizes downside risk, then ship.
Performance Maximalism and the Agent Economy
Solomon asked where the greatest opportunities sit now that Alpenglow is live. Watt called Solana engineers performance maximalists and listed three benefits of a high-performance backend. First, the network absorbs large amounts of activity, which matters as more assets and products move onchain. Second, high volume drives per-transaction costs very low, which starts a flywheel of additional activity. Third, short settlement times follow from low latency.
He said these properties fit three use cases in particular: payments, agents, and trading. Watt also made a point about business models. He thinks people underestimate how micropayments will change software when agents become common. Monthly and annual subscriptions exist largely because traditional payment minimums made small charges impractical. Blockchain removes that constraint. “We can rethink what it means to build a service that is valuable,” he said. He does not know what those services will look like, but he expects Solana to be ready.
Rotor Flattens Block Propagation
Watt then explained Rotor, the next major protocol change on Anza’s list. Solana works by sending transactions to a leader, which assembles a block. The leader must then deliver that block to thousands of validators worldwide, and each validator checks that every transaction is legitimate. Rotor changes how that block data travels.
The current mechanism is Turbine, which fans data out through multiple layers of validators. Rotor flattens that tree. Fewer network hops reduce latency and let the leader send larger blocks in less time. Watt tied this directly to affordability, since more capacity per block means cheaper transactions and room for more assets. He also explained why the change is now feasible. Hardware keeps improving, and Anza is willing to raise validator requirements. In his view, a handful of operators leasing powerful machines from data centers can still provide the economic security the network needs.
“We’re not afraid to lean into Moore’s Law,” he said, pointing to faster network cards and CPUs with more cores. This stance is deliberate. Anza prefers to push the performance ceiling up rather than cap the network at what modest hardware can handle.
Making the Protocol Geographically Aware
Watt flagged a second item that few observers are tracking yet. Anza plans to make the protocol aware of where validators sit in the world. Solana runs on servers across many countries, data centers, and internet providers. Watt compared this to a cloud customer paying extra for multiple availability zones, except Solana effectively has about a thousand of them. That diversity strengthens uptime and availability. However, the speed of light makes it hard to synchronize data across the whole planet.
The proposed fix has validators publish their coordinates onchain. Anza would then adjust the algorithms so leader handoffs follow an intelligent route, which reduces latency between consecutive leaders. Solomon compared this to pathfinding for liquidity routes. Watt said the analogy holds loosely, and that computer scientists know the underlying problem as the traveling salesman problem. Unlike liquidity routing, this version is purely about timing. It also needs careful consensus math so the network stays safe against attacks such as an eclipse attack.
The payoff is a network that keeps its global resilience while delivering regional performance. Watt contrasted this with competitors who chase Solana’s speed. “They cheat a little bit,” he said, by placing all machines in one data center and running a single sequencer. That design catches up on benchmarks but scales poorly to a global network. Solana already operates globally, so Anza wants to extend that lead.
Why the Window for New Layer-1 Chains Is Closing
Solomon closed by asking whether competitors can still catch up. Watt gave a two-part answer. Anza publishes its work as open source, so rivals can study it and the whole industry benefits. At the same time, he repeated a view he credits to Lily Liu, president of the Solana Foundation. The window to build a new Layer-1 blockchain, he said, “feels like it’s kind of over.” He compared it to launching an Uber competitor today, a decade after Uber and Lyft established the market.
Technology alone does not decide the outcome, in Watt’s view. Go-to-market execution, product quality, and testing all matter, and so does having assets onchain that applications can compose with. He named usage as Solana’s real moat. Developers who launch on Solana reach users who already hold assets in their wallets. Those users only need to connect and go, with little friction.
Watt tied this back to everyday finance. Many Americans skip investing because opening accounts, linking banks, and waiting for transfers feels like too much work. An app-like experience where funds arrive instantly could tip that default. Solomon added that enterprises and institutions will value an active user base as much as retail participants do. Together, those points explain why Anza keeps treating performance as its core identity.
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