Solana roadmap targets market microstructure with ACE

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

For some time now, Solana’s pitch has hinged on the levers of bandwidth and latency.

However, as we’ve seen from the limitations of high-frequency trading systems and the often uneven performance of existing onchain order books, high throughput and sub-second finality alone are likely insufficient to support the future of global markets.

While that may sound counterintuitive for a chain built on speed, it’s now emerging as the core thesis of a new, community-authored roadmap that lays out how Solana can become the backbone for internet capital markets.

Released last week, this new roadmap was co-authored by Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana Labs), Max Resnick (Anza), Lucas Bruder (Jito Labs), Austin Federa (DoubleZero), Chris Heaney (Drift) and Kyle Samani (Multicoin Capital).

They argue that in addition to solving for bandwidth and latency, the network must also account for market microstructure.

Solana wants to be the best place to build — not just for liquidity and scale, but for custom markets themselves. To do that, it needs to let applications control the rules of their own transaction sequencing.

The roadmap proposes a shift toward application-controlled execution (ACE), a model that would give smart contracts granular control over how trades are ordered and settled.

ACE breaks with the single-leader norm in favor of programmable execution environments and multiple concurrent validators.

Combined with infrastructure upgrades like Jito’s Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM), the DoubleZero fiber network and the upcoming Alpenglow consensus engine, Solana apps will soon be able to define bespoke order-matching rules designed to rival Wall Street systems.

BAM, rolling out in late July, enables apps to integrate custom sequencing logic — effectively delivering ACE today via a decentralized, TEE-powered network. It turns Solana blockspace into a programmable sandbox where developers can ship tailored order flow logic without forking clients or cutting BD deals with validators.

DoubleZero, currently live on testnet with over 100 validators and 3% of mainnet stake, reduces latency and jitter across the network by replacing the public internet with a multicast fiber backbone. It’s expected to go live on mainnet in mid-September.