While the market is watching price movements, Solana is quietly completing a technological upgrade at the protocol level. From late 2025 to early 2026, key updates like Firedancer and Alpenglow will be rolled out successively, and on-chain RWA (Real World Assets) are also experiencing explosive growth. When these two forces come together, Solana is set to make a leap in scale—not just an evolution of the chain itself, but potentially reshaping the entire competitive landscape of the crypto market in 2026.

In terms of performance, everyone’s impression of Solana is that it’s fast. But the definition of "fast" is evolving with the upgrade. The days of "fast but unstable" are coming to an end; the goal for 2026 is to be both fast and stable—the kind of stability that can serve as a foundation for financial infrastructure.

Let’s look at how Firedancer is playing out. This independent validator client developed by Jump Crypto was launched in December last year and has immediately shown impressive results. Now, Solana’s throughput has exceeded 600,000 TPS, with the ultimate goal of reaching a million transactions per second. What does this mean? Solana can handle the volume of global financial transactions, and the previous concerns about "technical bottlenecks" can basically be put to rest.

Plus, with Alpenglow’s optimizations, network stability and processing capacity are both stepping up. Coupled with the booming development of RWA on-chain—real assets like real estate, bonds, and stocks are all being tokenized—by 2026, the Solana ecosystem will have a completely different scope of possibilities. With a solid technical foundation, the application layer can truly take off.