Solana Key Upgrade for Network Efficiency Arrives on Testnet, What’s Next?

According to Solana-focused research and development firm Anza, SIMD-0334, which fixes Solana’s alt_bn128_pairing syscall check, is now live on testnet at epoch 900.

A syscall (system call) in the context of Solana refers to a function in the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) runtime, which allows Sandbox programs to perform specific operations.

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

The SIMD-0334 update adds a proper length check on the input bytes for elliptic-curve pairings, preventing any misuse with incorrectly sized inputs.

This fix will prevent accidental misuse of the alt_bn128_pairing syscall function, make programs easier to debug and update the behavior of the syscall function.

As reported, the SOL staking ratio reached 70%, an all-time high; this amounts to $60 billion worth of staked SOL. In another milestone for Solana, the market capitalization of real world assets (RWAs) has surpassed $1 billion.

What’s coming?

According to Anza, whose mission is to build and ship software that enables Solana to keep scaling without compromising on performance, decentralization or security, 2026 is about setting the foundation for the next phase of scaling.

Alpenglow, a long‑term consensus solution, continues to be in focus. Alphenglow provides tighter timing enforcement than TowerBFT and leverages BLS cryptographic primitives to significantly reduce finalization latency while preserving safety.

In 2026, Anza stated that the focus is on transitioning Alpenglow out of development clusters to the mainnet in Q3.

MCP introduces a foundation shift to the Solana market structure and crypto as a whole. In 2026, Anza teases the launch of an initial MCP version focused on ensuring transaction ordering within a batch in-protocol.