Howdy!

We’re in that weird part of the week where the last Severance episode is no longer fresh on the brain, and yet the new Severance episode is still days away. Here’s some Solana news to get you through it.

Today, we’ve got Anza’s 2025 roadmap, Solana’s REV, and an exclusive on Rakurai’s fundraise:

Solana dev shop teases doubled blockspace, higher TPS  

A few months ago, I was bewitched into clicking on solanaroadmap.com, a website that just reads “increase bandwidth reduce latency” — Solana’s preferred rallying cry of late. So it took me a few days to get around to checking out an apparent 2025 roadmap put out by Anza, which is the developer shop spun out of Solana Labs.

The roadmap was not a troll. It teased Anza’s plans to double Solana blockspace this year and laid out a bunch of smaller improvements meant to equip Solana to handle transactions more efficiently. As Solana prepares for a wider rollout of the high-performance Firedancer client, Anza is still eating its veggies, so to speak, by making small but necessary changes to Solana’s code. 

Anza develops Solana’s Agave client — the original validator software put out by Solana Labs — and works on a number of other engineering problems, similarly to how blockchain “labs” entities tend to work. Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz frequently mentions on the Lightspeed podcast that ironing out a number of small inefficiencies in Solana’s codebase could greatly improve the network’s already industry leading performance. Anza’s 2025 roadmap expresses a similar sentiment. 

“Complex systems are not optimized by one magic fix but rather the accumulation of thousands of micro-advancements,” Anza vice president of core engineering Brennan Watt wrote in the post.

Some of these micro-advancements include improving Agave’s scheduler, scaling Turbine (which is Solana’s block propagation protocol), and switching to a faster hashing algorithm for keeping data secure.

Increasing Solana’s block limit gets the most airtime out of the improvements in the piece. Solana blocks currently can contain up to 48 million compute units. Watt says this block limit limits Solana’s bandwidth, or the amount of data it can handle. Raising the amount of CUs that can be packed into a block can make it difficult for network participants to handle the load, so Anza is starting off with a modest block limit increase from 48 million to 50 million CUs per block.

One piece of the Solana network that could struggle with higher block limits is the so-called read layer, which must take blockchain data and turn it into a format that programs can read. 

The read layer is a widespread question for 2025. In a different sort of roadmap, the Solana Foundation’s head of product said Solana’s read layer “needs an overhaul” and teased improvements to come this year.

— Jack Kubinec

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REVersing course:

Solana’s real economic value — a measure of tips and fees that captures the demand for Solana’s blockspace — was roughly $19 million for the second week in a row. This still leads among layer-1 blockchains, but it’s also the least onchain demand Solana has seen since September.

It appears that the President Trump-inspired crime season that drove memecoin volumes through the roof has abated — at least for now.

— Jack Kubinec

Speed and efficiency win races — and in Solana’s case, the race is block execution. Lightspeed has learned exclusively that the infrastructure startup Rakurai just raised $3 million to optimize how transactions land onchain. Its key promise is a 5x boost in TPS.

Leading the round is Anagram Ventures, joined by Colosseum, Slow Ventures, Robot Ventures, Crypto.com, P2P.org, GlobalStake, and Cyber Fund.

Rakurai’s tech addresses one of Solana’s biggest pain points: scheduling inefficiencies. The long and short of it is, transaction execution isn’t as optimized as it could be. We're leaving a lot of throughput on the table. The folks at Rakurai want to fine-tune Solana’s node infrastructure through proprietary scheduling and pipeline optimizations that enhance tx processing predictability.

For traders and builders, this means faster execution with fewer delays. For validators, it means higher efficiency and improved staking yields. On the downside, an optimized transaction flow may mean that validators and stakers need to contend with fresh competitive pressures due to the growing role of third-party clients in shaping execution and rewards.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Robin A., founder and CEO of Raiku: