Anza Research: A New Chapter for Solana’s Protocol

Written By

Anza

December 16, 2024

The blockchain world thrives on innovation, and Anza is taking on the challenge by forming a new research team. Founded by Professor Roger Wattenhofer and two of his recent PhD students, Kobi Sliwinski and Quentin Kniep, from ETH Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich) in Switzerland, the research team will work on the fundamental aspects of the protocol to bring Solana to the next level. This includes designing a more performant and provably correct turbine-based consensus algorithm, as well as researching improvements to latency, resilience, and economics.

Origins

The team initially started looking at Solana about a year ago when the three published a paper that analyzed Solana’s consensus protocol and exposed areas for improvement. Anatoly reached out, and this sparked discussions with the Solana community about whether they should focus on potential fixes to the existing consensus protocol, or start fresh and rewrite it from the ground up. After engaging with the community and working on other major L1s, they decided to take the plunge and go all in on Solana. Bringing a research lens will allow them to improve Solana in previously unexplored ways.

Plan

The initial focus of the team is to revamp the consensus protocol in light of the newest research on adversarial behavior in distributed systems. First and foremost, the goal is to ensure state-of-the-art resilience to harsh network conditions and intentional attacks, laying a strong and reliable foundation. Simultaneously, the team will optimize the algorithm with performance in mind, targeting improvements regarding latency and throughput. In the future, the research team is going to broaden its horizon and look beyond the protocol core.

Team

The team comprises accomplished distributed systems researchers of ETH Zurich, one of the leading universities in the world.

Roger Wattenhofer is a professor at ETH Zurich and a world-leading expert in distributed systems. He advised the first ever PhD thesis in the blockchain domain, and won the 2012 Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing. He is also the author of the book “Blockchain Science,” which has been translated into several languages. Roger has worked with various crypto startups on cryptoeconomics.

Kobi Sliwinski, after being awarded for his Master’s thesis at Oxford, went on to study blockchain consensus and received a PhD from ETH Zurich. As a researcher at Dfinity, he worked on BFT broadcast protocols to radically improve consensus data throughput. Kobi brings a deep understanding of performance-focused distributed systems and Rust programming to Anza's mission.

Quentin Kniep specialized in scalable and future-proof blockchain systems as a PhD student at ETH Zurich. He joins the team with extensive experience in Rust development. He previously contributed to leading projects like Sui, Ethereum, and Algorand. Quentin collaborated in pioneering distributed execution in theory and implementation at Mysten Labs.