Solana Community Divided Over Anza MCP Proposal’s Impact on Validators and Perps Trading

Anza, a research and development firm originally spun out from Solana Labs, is bringing the network one step closer to its IBRL-centric North Star. 

Long promised as a solution to many of Solana’s protocol-level constraints, Anza’s MCP (Multiple Concurrent Proposers) proposal, Constellation, has finally been published. Anza claims that Constellation will empower Solana with a 50ms economic tick cycle; outperforming rivals across the industry.

While Anza’s MCP has been met with widespread approval from the Solana ecosystem, pockets of the community argue that Constellation could have a harmful impact on validator economics, and that the protocol-level constraints hindering the chain’s perps sector are exaggerated.

Anza Publishes Proposal for Eagerly Awaited MCP Update

Often touted as the silver bullet to a litany of Solana’s micro-market structure problems, like censorship and extractive transaction ordering, MCP is one of the most anticipated network updates since Firedancer demoed +1M TPS in 2022.

Constellation, a model published by Anza, becomes the first formalized MCP proposed to the Solana community, opening collaborative discussion to the general public. 

Currently, Solana suffers from temporary single proposer monopolies at a protocol level. Proposers exercise tremendous influence over the state for an extended period, giving them free reign over transaction ordering and inclusion. 

Under Constellation, each proposer includes a set of transactions and sends erasure-coded pslices as pshreds to the attesters; if enough attesters have seen shreds for a proposal, it must be included in the next execution cycle. Censorship becomes cryptographically enforceable, as opposed to being policy-based.

Note: pslices and pshreds are specific terminology used to formally distinguish them from Alpenglow slices and shreds

Anza’s MCP proposal has been widely celebrated among network participants. Alongside other protocol-level improvements like Alpenglow, p-token, and block limit increases, Solana advocates argue that the chain is re-asserting its dominance as crypto’s most performant Layer-1.

Meanwhile, Constellation is not without its detractors. Builders like FluxRPC’s Scott Hague contends that the design hard-codes “bundles” into the network at a protocol level, implying that Anza’s proposal is “basically pre-block coordination with witnesses”.

Other critics speculate that MCP implementation will inevitably lead to collusion between a single proposer and large-scale MEV clients to bypass censorship resistance.

Validator Economics to Change Under MCP?

Anza’s Constellation has sparked other discontentions among network participants, with some contributors arguing that the proposal is downplaying the impact MCP will have on validators.

Under Constellation, transaction inclusion and priority fees are still collected at execution time and passed on to validators. Anza assures operators that they will continue building blocks and earning fees, and will only lose control over ordering and inclusion.

Despite Anza’s claims that validator economics will “remain largely unchanged”, network contributors have called for the firm to be more forthcoming about the downstream effects of its MCP model.

Solana Foundation Head of Ecosystem Engineering Ilan Gitter has suggested that Anza’s MCP implementation could lead to “revenue losses short term” for validators, due to the fact that “their discretion over what goes in gets sharply constrained”. 

Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has refuted Gitter’s statement, arguing that there’s “no reason” that validators would be impacted.

The discussion comes amidst a trying period for the validator economy. Due to high operational costs, smaller operators are struggling to make ends meet. According to Superteam USA Lead and Layer 33 Founder Nicky Scanz, validators need around 160k $SOL “just to break even”, resulting in a severe decline in the number of network nodes.

Operating costs are expected to reduce significantly under Anza’s upcoming consensus update, Alpenglow, which requires validators to purchase per-epoch ‘tickets’ as opposed to the existing per-transaction costs.

Anza Forced into Action by Foundation Member’s Perps Essay?

While it's safe to assume, given the length and complexity of the Constellation whitepaper, that Anza’s MCP proposal has been in the works for many months, the timing of the release raised a few eyebrows across the ecosystem.

In the hours before Anza’s announcement, Solana Foundation representative Chase Barker published a comprehensive essay on the state of Solana’s perpetual trading scene. Among other issues identified, Barker called for protocol-level improvements that would help make the Solana Layer-1 a competitive environment for perps trading.

Constellation supposedly resolves some of these constraints, giving market makers greater control over transaction ordering and cancel prioritization. While a timeline has not been given for implementation, a public-facing MCP proposal reportedly makes great strides towards providing Solana with the foundations for a competitive perps sector.

In true Solana fashion, not everyone is convinced. Temporal co-founder Ben Coverston argues that the network is well-equipped to provide a competitive perps venue, positing that the chain’s underperformance in the sector is due to a lack of retail interest.

Currently, emerging perps venues, like Bulk and Bullet, have been forced into building dedicated execution environments that run adjacent to the Solana mainnet.

Constellation is now open to public debate and discourse, with a SIMD proposal expected to be formally voted upon by network participants in the future.

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