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The Solana ecosystem has intensified the attention of investors who have turned their eyes on it in 2024 with the launch of new tokens. During this period, major tokens such as Marinade (MNDE), Raydium (RAY), and Jupiter (JUP) attracted attention, recording strong trades using Solana's layer-1 infrastructure. According to data from DefiLlama, this growth in the Solana ecosystem is noticeable. With tokens such as Marinade (MNDE), Raydium (RAY), and Jupiter (JUP), the total value locked (TVL) has risen to $4.17 billion, an impressive increase since the beginning of the year. This represents almost three times the initial TVL of $1.53 billion#HotTopicDiscussion

BTC completed the Halving, the market fluctuated widely; the Meme section showed strong market momentum; Merlin Chain launched the Token MERL...

Author: fabiano.sol Compiled by: Tim, PANews Several projects on Solana are conducting buybacks, but: Who is performing a 100% buyback? After the buyback, who is burning tokens? Complete analysis of the Solana ecosystem buyback guide. 1. deBridge deBridge is allocating 100% of its revenue to buy back its own tokens. The specific plan for handling the tokens after the buyback has not yet been announced. So far, they have bought back 3% of the token supply. At this rate, they will be able to buy back nearly 20% of the circulating supply within a year.

Staking allows cryptocurrency holders to support blockchain networks and earn rewards. Liquid staking enhances this by converting staked assets into fungible tokens, improving liquidity and access to DeFi opportunities. Marinade Finance leads in liquid staking on Solana, enabling users to swap SOL for mSOL, while still earning staking rewards.

Performance surpasses Ethereum: Solana completes Alpenglow upgrade, aiming at high-frequency Decentralized Finance and payment sectors. According to Marinade Labs CEO Michael Repetny and relevant technical proposals, Solana's Alpenglow upgrade is indeed aimed at significantly reducing the operational costs for validators by restructuring the consensus mechanism and economic model, which may lower the barriers to participating in network validation. 🔧 Technical Principles: Cost Reduction through Consensus Mechanism Reform The Alpenglow upgrade fundamentally reshapes Solana's consensus mechanism by introducing a brand new finality engine called Votor and a high-performance data propagation layer known as Rotor. The core change is that the core activity of validator voting is moved from on-chain to off-chain. In the existing system, validators need to submit on-chain voting transactions for each time slot, consuming a large amount of network bandwidth and incurring high transaction fees, with nearly 75% of on-chain transactions being voting transactions. After the upgrade, validators exchange voting information directly through a dedicated network, and the leader node uses BLS aggregation signature technology to combine numerous signatures into a small "finality certificate" which is then published on-chain, greatly reducing on-chain data load and associated costs. 💰 Economic Model: Significant Reduction in Voting Fees The change in the economic model is key to reducing validator costs. Under the current model, validators need to pay about 2 SOL in on-chain voting fees for each epoch (approximately 2 days). Alpenglow introduces a fixed fee mechanism called "Validator Admission Ticket" (VAT), initially set at 1.6 SOL per epoch. This fee is non-refundable and will be burned. Although the VAT amount appears to decrease insignificantly, due to voting activities moving off-chain, validators will no longer need to pay dynamic transaction fees for each vote, which is expected to reduce overall voting-related costs by as much as 98%. This is precisely why Michael Repetny pointed out that the current monthly voting fees of about $4,000 (accounting for 80% of total costs) are expected to be significantly reduced. 🚪 Changes in Access Threshold: Greater Accessibility The significant reduction in operating costs directly impacts the economic threshold for becoming a validator. Analyses indicate that after the Alpenglow implementation, the minimum staking amount required for validators to achieve profitability may drop significantly from the current approximately 4,850 SOL to 450 SOL. This change (although the specific new staking scheme has not yet been fully announced) means that participants will not need to lock up large amounts of capital to run validation nodes, allowing more small operators and individuals to participate, which helps promote the decentralization of the network. At the same time, the reduction in operating costs and the simplification of the protocol (such as reduced bandwidth requirements) also make it more feasible to operate nodes in resource-constrained or poorly connected environments. 🌐 Potential Impact and Industry Outlook Lowering the barriers for validators could have profound implications for the Solana ecosystem. A broader and more decentralized distribution of validators can enhance the network's security and resilience. The leap in performance—reducing block finality time from about 12.8 seconds to 100-150 milliseconds—combined with lower participation costs, may attract more developers to build applications on Solana that require high throughput and instant finality, such as payments, gaming, and high-frequency trading. Additionally, the drastic increase in transaction confirmation speed may compress the operational space for MEV (max extractable value) arbitrageurs, making the network fairer for ordinary users. In summary, Solana's Alpenglow upgrade, through profound technical and economic model reconstruction, is expected to enhance network performance while significantly lowering the costs and barriers for validator participation, potentially further driving the prosperity and decentralization process of the ecosystem.