Solana Ecosystem Update: Summary from Accelerate NYC
The Solana ecosystem has entered a new phase of momentum — and it’s no longer just about speed. A crypto conference called Solana Accelerate NYC, held from 19 to 23 May, 2025, brought together builders and institutions for five days of developer summits, technical workshops, and protocol announcements.
The event featured two distinct tracks: ‘Scale or Die’, a developer-focused conference delving into deep tech, infrastructure, validators, and blockspace scalability; and ‘Ship or Die’, a broader showcase where policymakers, entrepreneurs, and crypto projects presented live products and policy initiatives.
One thing was clear throughout the conference: Solana is doubling down on both performance and adoption. The DWF Ventures team has written down event’s key highlights.
And let’s go through a breakdown of the most important updates.
A New Era of Consensus: Introducing Alpenglow
One of the most significant announcements from Accelerate NYC was Alpenglow, Solana’s new consensus protocol that represents a major evolution beyond the existing TowerBFT and Proof-of-History model. This advanced design introduces Votor for voting and block finalisation, along with Rotor, a reengineered data dissemination layer that significantly boosts speed and efficiency by reducing network latency by a factor of 100.
Alpenglow Latency Histogram for Leader in Zurich. Source: anza.xyz, as of May 19, 2025
As a result, the network becomes not only faster but also significantly more efficient and robust — positioning Solana to compete with traditional Web2 infrastructure in terms of responsiveness.
But improving consensus is only part of the story. Accessibility and decentralisation at the node level are also essential to strengthening the network.
Mithril: Lightweight Self-Verifying Nodes
Following the enhancements to consensus, the validator team at Overclock Labs presented progress on Mithril, a self-verifying full node software client for the Solana blockchain. Unlike traditional blockchain node implementations that often require powerful, enterprise-grade servers, Mithril is specifically engineered to run on standard consumer hardware such as personal computers or widely available cloud machines.
The Mithril client currently processes each Solana block in approximately 450 milliseconds, meaning it can keep up with real-time block production on the network. During the initial stage known as ledger snapshotting, where the node downloads and verifies a complete history of past transactions, Mithril uses up to 8 gigabytes of random-access memory (RAM). Once synchronised and operating under normal conditions, the software’s memory usage drops and stabilises at around 3 gigabytes, which is considered lightweight compared to traditional blockchain nodes.
While Mithril lowers the barrier for node participation, further scaling Solana’s infrastructure requires smarter ways to manage on-chain data.
ZK Compression v2: Cost-Efficient Scalability
In tandem with improvements to node access, Solana is revolutionising on-chain storage with ZK Compression v2, launched by Light Protocol. This upgrade optimises how state is stored on the blockchain, making it significantly more efficient and cost-effective.
At its core, ZK Compression enables developers and users to compress on-chain state, reducing storage costs by orders of magnitude while preserving Solana’s Layer 1 security, performance, and composability. Specifically, the update delivers:
- Up to 70% more efficiency for rent-free Solana tokens and accounts;
- 1,000x reduction in on-chain storage costs;
- SPL-level efficiency for specific payment flows.
The mechanism works by storing only compressed state roots on-chain, while the bulk of data resides in a cheaper part of the Solana ledger. Zero-knowledge validity proofs (ZK proofs) verify integrity, ensuring security without storing all data directly on-chain.
Solana Leads in Revenue of Decentralised Applications
With infrastructure and scalability improvements driving down costs, the impact is becoming clear at the application layer.
Solana has now become the top blockchain in terms of application revenue, surpassing Ethereum by capturing 57% of total dapp revenue across the crypto market.
Application Revenue by Chain. Source: DefiLlama via Blockworks Research, as of April 30, 2025
This shift reflects a broader rise in meaningful user activity on Solana-native applications, growing trust among developers in the network’s economic foundations, and a more sustainable model for building and scaling decentralised ecosystems.
Institutional Liquidity On-Chain
As Solana strengthens its position across both infrastructure and application layers, its appeal to institutional players is growing rapidly.
SOL Strategies, a public U.S. company that offers exposure to staking on Solana, has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Superstate to explore bringing SEC-registered stock son-chain via the Opening Bell platform. This makes SOL Strategies the first public company pursuing tokenised shares on-chain, pending regulatory approval. In parallel, protocols like Drift are expanding into real-world asset (RWA) markets by integrating institutional credit funds. The initiative aims to offer traditional finance investors compliant, 24/7 access to tokenised shares, a step toward introducing institutional liquidity to the Solana blockchain ecosystem.
At the same time, DeFi protocols like Drift are actively collaborating with institutional partners to bring RWAs on-chain through structured credit funds, further strengthening Solana’s position at the intersection of decentralised finance and regulated markets.
Conclusion
Solana Accelerate NYC showcased more than just technical progress — it reflected the growing maturity of the Solana ecosystem as a whole. From protocol-level advancements such as Alpenglow and Mithril to breakthroughs in scalability, application growth, and institutional finance, Solana is evolving into a comprehensive platform capable of supporting both decentralised and regulated use cases at scale.
