Anatoly Yakovenko, Max Resnick Outline Gameplan for NASDAQ-on-Solana

Since co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko’s fabled two-coffees-and-a-beer epiphany, NASDAQ on Solana has been the network’s unattainable north star.

But despite the seemingly insurmountable challenge, Toly and Anza Lead Economist Max Resnick appear to have cracked the code.

What is Anza’s new plan for tightening orderbook spreads and how can multiple concurrent leaders facilitate more efficient markets?

Anza Presents Solution to Biggest Obstacle

Returning to first principles, Toly and Resnick have suggested how a redesign of Solana consensus could help tighten orderbook spreads. By closing the distance between the highest buy order and the lowest sell order, Solana can effectively give traders better prices in internet capital markets.

To truly compete with, and eventually outperform the NASDAQ, Anza argues that market makers need to be able to react to abrupt changes in market dynamics faster than is currently possible. 

When sharp price movements shift asset value outside the existing spread, makers and takers race to adjust their orders, with makers trying to cancel stale orders before takers can snipe them. According to Anza research, CEX makers only successfully cancel their orders less than 13% of the time, with onchain MMs suffering even lower success rates.

Much of this inefficiency is due to Solana’s reliance on Jito Auctions, which essentially enable the highest bidder to win the race to either cancel or snipe a stale order. 

This model puts MMs in a difficult position, requiring them to outbid takers to cancel their order, or allow takers to snipe the order. In both cases, the market maker is at a loss.

While app-specific sequencing allowing market makers’ cancel orders to front-run taker orders has been touted as a possible solution, this is still reliant on singular leaders who can choose to ignore cancellations.

Fortunately, Anza has a solution. With multiple concurrent leaders, makers’ cancellation orders should be able to front-run takers without falling victim to censorship from singular leaders. The proposed changes are believed to help Solana close the gap on the world’s leading financial trading platforms, while remaining sufficiently decentralized.

While high-performance trading platforms are becoming increasingly common in the blockchain industry, they typically need to sacrifice decentralization in favor of scalability. For example, though Hyperliquid currently commands the highest onchain perps volume across all chains, the network is only secured by 21 active validators, five of which are operated by the Hyper Foundation.

Multiple Concurrent Leader Concerns

While the proposed model theoretically enables more efficient markets, questions remain around how to merge blocks of transactions in the case of conflicts.

To address this concern, Anza has suggested a two-pronged fee model, including ordering and inclusion fees. 

Similar to the auction model, blocks from different leaders are merged and ordered based on paid ordering fees and burnt, while inclusion fees are paid directly to validators.

Solana Community Supports Tightened Spreads

Crafted by Toly and Resnick, the proposed vision has been widely applauded by network participants. Despite multiple concurrent leader implementations still expected to be years away, Solana bulls have rallied behind the prospect of more efficient markets. 

This progress is expected to be bolstered further by upcoming network improvements such as SIMD-256, which will further increase Solana block limits.

However, not everyone shares in the enthusiasm. Robert Sags, co-founder of Rival Layer-1 SVM blockchain Fogo stipulated that public blockchains will never be able to compete with NASDAQ and NYSE execution environments.

Regardless, Anza’s suggested changes are yet to be formulated into an official Solana Improvement Document (SIMD). Ecosystem leaders and network participants will likely deliberate on the implications of the model at length before it is drafted and submitted to Solana governance.

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Watch Max Resnick’s Solana Crossroads Keynote on the Proposal

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