Solana key upgrade for network efficiency hits testnet, what's next?

According to Solana-focused research and development company Anza, SIMD-0334, which fixes Solana's alt_bn128_pairing system call check, has been published on testnet in epoch 900.

A syscall (system call) in the context of Solana refers to a function in the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) runtime that allows a sandboxed program to perform a specific operation.

alt_bn128_pairing, used in zero-knowledge proofs, is a system call for pairing on BN128 elliptic curves and takes as input a list of curve points. Each pair of points is 192 bytes, so a valid input must be a multiple of 192 bytes long. However, the current code does not properly perform input length checks.

The SIMD-0334 update adds proper length checks to input bytes for elliptic curve pairs to prevent misuse due to improperly sized inputs.

This fix prevents misuse of the alt_bn128_pairing syscall function and makes it easier to debug programs and update the behavior of the syscall function.

As reported, sol The staking ratio reached 70%, an all-time high. This equates to $60 billion worth of stakes sol. Another milestone for Solana was reaching a real world assets (RWA) market capitalization of over $1 billion.

What's coming?

According to Anza, whose mission is to build and ship software that allows Solana to continue to scale without sacrificing performance, decentralization, or security, 2026 will be the time to lay the foundation for the next phase of scaling.

Alpenglow, a long-term consensus solution, continues to gain traction. Alphenglow provides tighter timing enforcement than TowerBFT and leverages BLS cryptographic primitives to significantly reduce finalization latency while remaining secure.

In 2026, Anza said he will focus on moving Alpenglow from the development cluster to mainnet in the third quarter.

MCP brings fundamental changes to the Solana market structure and cryptocurrencies as a whole. In 2026, Anza heralds the release of an initial MCP version focused on ensuring ordering of transactions within batches within the protocol.