Solana's AI Vision: From Anxiety to Transformation

Many relationships in the world are like a seesaw. On one side, the price of ETH's tenth anniversary coin is experiencing a revival, while on the other side, SOL is becoming a bit anxious. The path of the "Ethereum killer" has become even more difficult, not to mention that it has welcomed a batch of its own "challengers", which somewhat reflects the idea of the tides turning.

However, moderate anxiety is not necessarily a bad thing for individuals or projects. For the battle-hardened Solana, it is even more familiar to deal with. In this article, we will learn about some significant recent initiatives from the official Solana and delve into the current landscape and future prospects of Solana AI in the AI sector.

Official Major Actions Frequent

Alpenglow Upgrade: Replacing SoH, Enhancing Speed and Competitiveness

Alpenglow is known as the most significant upgrade to the Solana core protocol to date, comparable in importance to Ethereum's transition from PoW to PoS consensus. The mission of Alpenglow is to replace the existing PoH (Proof of History) and Tower BFT (Tower Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus mechanisms.

In the past, PoH significantly simplified block synchronization time because it did not require synchronized timestamps, and Tower BFT adopted a "one packs, others vote" approach, allowing Solana to lead all public chains in high performance in its early days. However, this structure incurs huge computational overhead under high loads, and the single-leader overload issue of Tower BFT has led to the frequent downtime problems that Solana is often criticized for.

Alpenglow has removed the potential power killer PoH and combined Votor (weighted voting) with node clock processing time sequence and confirmation to reduce the computational burden on leader nodes; it also paves the way for multiple leaders to propose blocks simultaneously in the future. Another core component, Rotor, is used to optimize block propagation and synchronization, reducing block confirmation time from 12.8s to 150ms.

After the implementation of Alpenglow, the minimum staking amount required for validators to profit will be significantly reduced, which is expected to enhance the decentralization of the network.

ICM Roadmap: Optimize Trading, Build "On-chain Nasdaq"

Solana Labs, in collaboration with several core development teams within its ecosystem, has released the "Internet Capital Markets" (ICM) roadmap.

Currently, the final confirmation of transactions on Solana takes 12-13 seconds. It is expected that after the Alpenglow upgrade, the confirmation time will be reduced to 150 milliseconds, reclaiming the speed advantage. In addition, the ICM roadmap also includes empowering dApps on the platform, allowing dApps to determine the priority of transactions themselves; as well as protecting market makers and addressing the MEV issue, among others.

Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, stated that he hopes to complete the on-chain process for traditional financial assets within a year, and within five years to provide compliant, open-source on-chain IPOs for entrepreneurs, ultimately creating an open, low-cost, decentralized internet capital market.

Solana's AI Landscape

The development timeline of AI projects on Solana is extensive, and the range of the field can be viewed in three stages:

Phase 1: Early DePIN ecosystem explosion, DeAI begins to sprout and grow

Representative projects at this stage include AI computing networks such as Render, io.net, and Aethir, as well as decentralized data collection and edge computing networks like Grass, Helium, Roam, and Gradient Network. These projects have actively explored the infrastructure field combining blockchain and AI.

Phase 2: AI Agent Blossoming in Many Aspects

With the significant enhancement of LLM capabilities, applications such as AI Agents have rapidly developed over the past year. Representative projects include Wayfinder, ElizaOS, Holoworld, Moby AI, Hey Anon, among others. These projects cover various aspects, including AI Agent frameworks, cross-chain operations, and DeFi interactions.

Phase Three: The Post-Chain AI Era, a more pragmatic step towards On-Chain DeAI

Projects at this stage focus more on practical applications and infrastructure development. Representative projects include:

• Nous Research: Committed to training open-source AI models that can compete with mainstream large models through a decentralized approach.
• Arcium: Provides privacy infrastructure for AI model training, inference, and AI Agent applications using MPC and ZKP technologies.
• Neutral Trade: A hedge fund platform based on Solana that offers a variety of AI-driven quantitative and automated trading strategies.

Advantages of the Solana AI Ecosystem

1. Fast and Cost-effective: After the Alpenglow upgrade, the confirmation time has been reduced to 150 milliseconds, further lowering latency and costs.
2. Good liquidity: Having a mature and active DeFi ecosystem is beneficial for the circulation and financing of AI tokens.
3. Smart Contract Support: SVM can efficiently handle complex logic, making it suitable for on-chain execution required for AI tasks.
4. Decentralization: The Alpenglow upgrade will reduce operating costs and is expected to attract more nodes to join.
5. Ecological linkage: A complete, diverse, and mature ecosystem that facilitates cross-field collaboration for AI projects.

The arrival of the Alpenglow upgrade is highly anticipated. At that time, Solana will become more powerful. But will it be strong enough to bear the two narratives of "on-chain Nasdaq" and AI, and compete with more general-purpose and proprietary chains? Perhaps only time will tell the answer.