Performances
RD Popularity Index
RD Growth Index
Comparison
Follow Updates
Follow Lists
People
About Anza
Anza is a core development company within the Solana ecosystem, primarily responsible for maintaining Agave, the main validator client software that runs the Solana network. Its core business is developing and upgrading the Solana protocol itself, with a focus on improving network performance, decentralization, and user experience.
Anza's competitive edge lies in its close relationship with the Solana Foundation and its deep involvement in protocol-level innovations. The company addresses key market pain points: Solana's current leader-based transaction ordering creates centralization risks and potential censorship; network bandwidth and transaction limits constrain growth; and high storage costs and complex developer experiences hinder application adoption.
In the past six months (2026-02-28 to 2026-08-31), Anza has made significant progress. It announced Alpenglow, a new consensus engine designed to replace the existing TowerBFT mechanism, offering stricter time enforcement and reduced finality latency through BLS cryptography. The company also introduced Multiple Concurrent Proposers (MCP), which aims to break the single-leader monopoly by enforcing transaction ordering during the replay phase. Additionally, Anza has been working on increasing bandwidth through XDP-based shred transmission, raising block limits to 100 million compute units, reducing slot times below 400ms, and lowering rent costs for developers.
However, there have been challenges. In February 2026, Anza laid off approximately 20% of its staff, citing the need to focus on core priorities. Moreover, both Alpenglow and MCP remain in development stages, with mainnet deployment not yet achieved, meaning their real-world impact is still unproven.
Anza, a development shop spun out of Solana Labs, forked the Solana validator client into Agave in March 2024 to decouple its engineering roadmap. Agave 2.1, adopted on mainnet in 2025, cut average slot times below 400ms and skip rates under 0.5%, laying the groundwork for higher throughput. In 2026, Anza recommended mainnet validators upgrade to Agave 4.0, which reduced Turbine retransmission delays to roughly 0.8ms via XDP offloading, a critical step toward 100M CU blocks. Concurrently, Anza proposed SIMD-0389 to slash account creation rent by 10x, aiming to unlock dormant SOL and lower storage barriers for developers. Chief economist Max Resnick noted SOL trading volume on-network already triples Binance's, signaling intensifying competition. These milestones—client diversification, sub-second finality, rent reform, and network-scale economics—mark Anza's shift from core maintainer to a driver of Solana's long-term scalability and accessibility.
Anza is a Solana-focused R&D firm. Key leadership includes:
- Jeff Washington: CEO, former Solana Labs core member.
- Jed Halfon: Chief Strategy Officer, ex-Solana Labs.
- Amber Christiansen: COO, previously Head of Operations at Solana Labs.
- Max Resnick: Chief Economist, former Head of Research at Consensys' Special Mechanisms Group.
Founders also include Stephen Akridge, Amber Christiansen, Pankaj Garg, and Jon Cinque, all ex-Solana Labs engineers.
Anza is a core R&D lab in the Solana ecosystem, founded in 2023 by former core engineers from Solana Labs, leading the development of the Agave validator client and consensus innovations such as Alpenglow.
Recent team change: In August 2026, Greg Petrossian joined as Go-To-Market Lead. With extensive experience in market expansion and ecosystem development, he will help Anza bring its technological achievements to broader applications. Previously, Anza had already gathered several top researchers (e.g., Max Resnick). This addition of commercial talent shows that while maintaining technical leadership, Anza is accelerating ecosystem commercialization and partner networks, laying the foundation for Solana's long-term prosperity.