Solana Constellation: Fair Internet Capital Markets

Today we're ready to share Constellation, a protocol design for multiple concurrent proposers on Solana. Constellation is the result of the Anza team iteratively improving on multiple concurrent proposer designs over the last year. We are sharing this with the public now because we are ready to build. We want to hear feedback from the Solana community, and we hope you will like this latest design as much as we do.

Solana core developers are willing to endure a lot of pain if there is a big enough prize waiting at the end. We believe Solana needs consistent and fair market structure to achieve the vision of internet capital markets. This is a major change and touches many different parts of the protocol. But we are willing to put in the work because we believe the juice is worth the squeeze.

Before we get into the details of this, we should clarify one important point: this proposal does not represent a significant departure from existing validator economics. Validators still build blocks and earn fees (both base and priority), just without exclusive control over inclusion and ordering.

The proposal calls for two types of fees: inclusion fees, similar to today’s base fee, paid to the proposer who includes the transaction as compensation for using up their blockspace, and ordering fees that apply as part of the merge rule joining transactions from multiple proposers together. We would love it if we could simply send the ordering fees to the leader because that would be simple, but unfortunately there is an attack in which the leader could pay themselves a high ordering fee and, through this attack, effectively retain ordering control over the protocol for free (exactly the thing we are trying to avoid with multiple concurrent proposers). So, instead of giving the ordering fees directly to the leader of the slot, the proposal calls for distributing them among the entire validator set by stake weight. The bottom line is, validators will still earn protocol fees from inclusion (base fees) and ordering (priority fees) as they do today in proportion to their stake weight; the ordering fees will just be smoothed out over the epoch.

Ok, now into the details!

Constellation is designed to work as a preprocessor to Alpenglow. Currently, whoever is the Solana block leader has a temporary monopoly over transaction ordering. They see everything and choose what gets packed into a block. Constellation removes this monopoly by allowing multiple proposers to simultaneously collect and submit transactions. Attesters hold the leader accountable by ensuring that proposers send their blocks on time. The leader still assembles the block, but if enough attesters saw a transaction, the leader must include it. They can't censor high-bid transactions in favor of low-bid ones, and they can't pretend a transaction didn’t exist; they have no power to reorder transactions.

Constellation introduces a 50ms cycle, giving Solana the fastest protocol-enforced economic tick of any production blockchain. Every cycle, proposers submit transactions, attesters timestamp and forward what they saw, and the leader assembles a batch. Transactions still pay two fees: an inclusion fee based on transaction size and signature count, and a priority fee set as CU limit × bid. Both fees are collected at execution by the validator, just as they are today. Constellation also introduces a fee payer reserve, ensuring inclusion fees are always payable while limiting spam across proposers. Validator economics remain largely unchanged, with leaders still building blocks and earning fees, just without exclusive control over what gets included.

There are other designs that attempt to improve ordering and fairness, but Constellation is the first to deliver protocol-enforced censorship resistance at this speed. These guarantees are built directly into the protocol and verified by every validator, rather than relying on external parties or trust assumptions.

Read the full constellation whitepaper: anza.xyz/constellationwhitepaper.

And check out an interactive demo: anza.xzy/constellation