The primary economic implication of the emerging Solana technology advancements is a fundamental transformation in the network’s capacity to host global financial activity, specifically, high-frequency trading and complex financial derivatives directly on-chain.
The goal is to reach one million transactions per second (TPS), a sufficient level to handle the combined volume of major global payment networks and traditional markets such as NASDAQ and CME (Resnick, 2024). This potential for on-chain volume is projected to unlock massive revenue streams from transaction fees, potentially reaching $60 billion annually at full scale (Resnick, 2024).
My thesis argues that Application-Specific Sequencing (ASS) and Double Zero represent a strategic economic transformation of Solana’s validator model transitioning from MEV-based incentives to a scalable, inclusion-fee driven infrastructure, which positions Solana to rival traditional financial systems.
Validator Incentives and Network Evolution
More importantly, this influx of capital would flow under a new validator incentive model centered around inclusion fees instead of MEV auctions or priority fees. This shift marks a fundamental restructuring of validator economics, triggering a phase of validator commoditization.
To understand the impact, it helps to contrast Solana’s emerging infrastructure with traditional financial markets. Historically, centralized markets have maintained a near-monopoly on high-frequency trading due to their superior speed, lower latency, and significantly tighter price spreads compared to the current capabilities of on-chain markets.
Early Solana implementations, such as Serum’s first-come, first-served model and the Jito auction system, inadvertently harmed market makers. For instance, stale orders were difficult to cancel quickly, exposing liquidity providers to unnecessary losses (Resnick, 2025). This dynamic forced market makers to widen their spreads or move their quoting logic entirely off-chain onto Layer 2s.
One overlooked problem blockchains currently face is their reliance on the public internet. It introduces significant bottlenecks, including unpredictable latency, jitter, and a lack of widespread support for features such as data prioritization or efficient multicast—issues that private financial networks do not face (Double Zero, 2024). These limitations make it challenging to achieve reliable, low-latency communication on-chain, which is crucial to competitive market making.
Infrastructure Upgrades and Commoditization
The current advancements are designed to address these limitations and improve upon prior implementations directly. Solana is reducing validator costs as a means to eventually commoditize validators. This reduced cost enables the network to scale sufficiently to meet its goal of supporting global financial activities like high-frequency trading. Solana still needs validators to be incentivized enough to operate after commoditization; reducing validator costs addresses this need.
One development is the focus on multi-leader consensus combined with Application-Specific Sequencing (ASS) (Eclipse Labs, 2024). Multi-leader consensus is a consensus architecture where multiple block producers (leaders) can propose blocks simultaneously or within overlapping time windows, rather than relying on a single designated leader per slot. ASS allows individual applications (e.g., DEXes) to decide the order of transactions within their domains, rather than relying on the global validator-driven scheduler.
This architecture enables applications, particularly on-chain order books, to prioritize crucial transactions such as cancel orders, protecting market makers from adverse selection scenarios. These are difficult to mitigate under single-leader consensus or validator-controlled MEV auctions.
Priority fees are burned instead of paid to validators, allowing the protocol to control transaction ordering rather than leaving it to validators. The burned fees also reduce validator income. Applications can guide this ordering through new syscalls based on their logic (Resnick, 2025). Complementary to this is hardware acceleration in the Ingress/Egress Ring, which pre-filters spam and verifies signatures before data reaches validators (Double Zero, 2025). The offloading of significant computational work significantly reduces validator expenses over time.
Emerging discussions also suggest significantly reducing validator vote fees, currently the most significant operational expense. Reducing them makes participation economically viable for a broader range of operators (Helius, 2024).
Solana is strategically reducing validator operating costs to enable a future reduction in validator rewards without triggering mass validator exits. It's a controlled commoditization move: validators, like internet routers, become "plentiful but cheap" infrastructure.
Network Scaling and Inclusion Fees
The near-term effects are already materializing. One is the increase in the Compute Unit (CU) limit per block, targeting 100 million CU by year-end as part of the roadmap toward one million TPS (Resnick, 2024). According to Max Resnick’s Turbin3 presentation, the Double Zero testnet already demonstrates more consistent and predictable network performance than the public internet (Resnick, 2024).
To incentivize post-commoditization validators, the broader design shifts validator revenue toward inclusion fees based on high transaction volume. The move away from priority fees necessitates validator cost-cutting. Otherwise, inclusion fees alone wouldn't cover their current operating costs.
As Solana transitions to an inclusion-fee dominant economy, multi-leader consensus becomes critical for scaling, preventing reward concentration, and ensuring a decentralized validator set. These implementations are strategically complementary, enabling the new system to function effectively and scale globally.
Long-Term Economic Outlook
The future effects are potentially profound for Solana and the broader crypto landscape. This architecture positions Solana as a credible competitor to traditional financial infrastructure. The roadmap centered on multi-leader consensus, asynchronous execution, and Double Zero aims to achieve one million TPS, enabling on-chain order books to compete directly with traditional markets (Resnick, 2024).
This focus is expected to attract substantial transaction volume, providing the revenue necessary to sustain the network through inclusion fees. In theory, as this model matures, smaller and independent validators could become economically self-sufficient without relying on programs like the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP).
Future possibilities include community-led initiatives to gain ownership of dedicated fiber infrastructure through consortiums or exploring alternative solutions like satellite networks, enhancing decentralization and global reach (Federa, 2025).
While technical hurdles remain, particularly in building asynchronous execution, and political challenges surround the evolution of validator rewards, Solana’s ambition is clear: to create an on-chain environment where global finance can operate efficiently, scalably, and competitively.
Conclusion
Solana's strategic adoption of ASS and Double Zero reflects an effort to realign its validator and transaction infrastructure with the demands of global finance. By commoditizing validators, refocusing incentives around inclusion fees, and addressing latency challenges through technical innovation, the network lays the groundwork (no pun intended) for a decentralized yet financially viable alternative to traditional markets. If successful, this validator-economic transformation could redefine the crypto-economic playbook, shifting from extractive MEV models to scalable, fee-driven architectures capable of sustaining decentralized global finance.
References
- Eclipse Labs. (2024). Making Order Books Great Again: Introducing Application-Specific //eclipse.builders/blog/making-order-books-great-again-introducing-application-specific-sequencing/
- Double Zero. (2024). Double Zero Whitepaper. Retrieved from: https://doublezero.xyz/
- Helius. (2024). A Vision for Solana in 2024. Retrieved from: https://www.helius.dev/blog/a-vision-for-solana-in-2024
- Turbin3 Cohort Presentation. (2025). Max Resnick(Private Session — no public link.)
- Double Zero Presentation. (2025) Austin Federa (In-person presentation)
- Max Resnick & Anatoly Yakovenko (2025)Path to a decentralized Nasdaq Retrieved from: https://www.anza.xyz/blog/the-path-to-decentralized-nasdaq Sequencing. Retrieved from: https:
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