Kyle Samani predicts: Solana's on-chain cornerstone position established, SOL price may迎a new round of valuation restructuring

On February 11, 2026, Gate Data shows Solana (SOL) priced at $80, down 4.3% over the past 24 hours. SOL’s current circulating market cap is $45.8 billion, ranking seventh in the overall market. This price level is no coincidence—recently, Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, asserted that over the next 18 months, the microstructure improvements of the Solana on-chain market will surpass any other period in cryptocurrency history.

As one of the earliest top institutional investors heavily holding Solana, Kyle’s prediction is far from unfounded. He explicitly states that the upcoming seven major upgrades—Alpenglow, ACE, MCL, and others—are transforming Solana from a “high-performance public chain” into “the on-chain cornerstone of internet-native capital markets.” This article will analyze from Gate’s perspective how these technological evolutions are rewriting DeFi’s underlying logic and bringing structural revaluation to SOL assets.

Alpenglow: Consensus Speed Approaching Nasdaq

Solana will launch its largest consensus layer upgrade in history—Alpenglow—in Q2 2026. Dubbed by developers as the “Avalanche Rebuild,” this plan will remove the Proof of History and Tower BFT mechanisms used since genesis, replacing them with a completely new block propagation and voting system.

Key breakthroughs:

• Final block confirmation time: 12 seconds → 100–150 milliseconds
• Consensus logic complexity: reduced by 70%
• Hardware requirements: further lowered, making validator entry more accessible

For high-frequency financial applications, 150 milliseconds means Solana’s on-chain latency is approaching Nasdaq matching engine levels. Kyle emphasizes: “In the past, CeFi mocked DeFi for not handling order flow; Alpenglow will completely bridge that gap.”

Gate Research Institute data shows that 23 institutional market makers plan to increase their on-chain order flow on Solana to over 40% after Alpenglow’s deployment.

ACE: Application-Defined Ordering

Traditional blockchains give full transaction ordering rights to validators, leading to MEV proliferation and liquidity fragmentation. ACE (Application-Controlled Execution) is Solana’s core roadmap’s ultimate weapon against this issue.

ACE allows smart contracts to decide:

• Transaction ordering logic (e.g., time priority, price priority, privacy priority)
• Settlement priority (e.g., large orders first, anti-front-running)
• Anti-MEV mechanisms (e.g., batch auctions, random ordering)

This means protocols like Jupiter, Raydium, Drift will no longer passively accept block producer ordering but can customize their matching engines like traditional exchanges. Kyle comments: “ACE grants Solana-based DeFi Nasdaq- or CME-level micro-market control.”

Gate launched a Solana spot trading zone in January 2026 and plans to integrate support for custom order flows into the first batch of DEXs after ACE’s mainnet launch.

MCL: Throughput No Longer Has a Ceiling

While Solana’s current single-leader model is fast, it still faces the bottleneck of “single point block production” delay. MCL (Multi-Concurrent Block Production) will enable multiple leaders to propose blocks simultaneously, then merge them into a single canonical chain via aggregation algorithms.

Immediate benefits:

• Transaction finalization time reduced by over 50%
• Exponential increase in censorship resistance—single leaders cannot block specific transactions
• Throughput no longer limited by individual node hardware

For applications requiring instant high concurrency—such as options auctions, NFT minting, RWA auctions—MCL turns “infinite scalability” from slogan into reality.

PropAMMs: On-Chain Professional Market Makers

If Alpenglow, ACE, and MCL are the underlying highways, PropAMMs (Proprietary Automated Market Makers) are the Ferraris running on these roads.

Unlike traditional constant product pools like Raydium and Orca, PropAMMs:

• Are privately deployed by professional market makers such as Jump, Wintermute
• Use real-time oracle prices to actively quote, with spreads as narrow as 0.5–1 basis point
• Do not accept permissionless deposits; liquidity is fully managed by institutions

Currently, PropAMMs account for 62% of Solana DEX total trading volume (source: The Block, February 2026). On major pairs like SOL–USDC, prices even outperform Gate’s spot order book.

Kyle states plainly: “PropAMMs enable Solana DEXs to achieve price efficiency that surpasses centralized exchanges for the first time.”

Aggregators: Liquidity Consolidators

Liquidity fragmentation remains a perennial challenge in DeFi. Jupiter, Dflow, and other aggregators split orders across dozens of DEXs, AMMs, and PropAMMs, automatically finding the lowest slippage paths across the entire network.

As of February 11, Jupiter’s daily trading volume reached $1.87 billion, surpassing Uniswap V3 on Ethereum. Gate’s liquidity index shows that on-chain trades executed via aggregators on Solana now have an average slippage below 0.08%, fully meeting professional trader standards.

Conditional Liquidity: Smart Liquidity

In traditional AMMs, limit orders are highly vulnerable to sandwich attacks, forcing market makers to widen spreads. Conditional liquidity allows liquidity to be available only when called by “trusted frontends” or “non-toxic order flows.”

Typical scenarios:

• Only orders from Jupiter’s frontend verified against front-running
• Only addresses holding tokens for over 30 days can access liquidity

This “smart liquidity” incentivizes market makers to narrow spreads by over 70%, ultimately benefiting ordinary users. Kyle believes: “Conditional liquidity is the key puzzle piece for Solana’s retail user experience to surpass CEXs.”

SVM and Scheduler

Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) is the environment for executing smart contracts. The 2026 scheduler upgrade will introduce:

• Asynchronous program execution (APE): read/write operations no longer block computation
• Granular resource optimization: each transaction’s resource consumption drops by 30%
• AI-driven scheduling algorithms: dynamically allocate block space based on network congestion forecasts

These seemingly low-level improvements directly increase the number of complex instructions executable per second. For compute-intensive applications like ZK verification, fully homomorphic encryption, and AI inference, SVM is shifting from “adequate” to “excess capacity.”

Summary

Kyle Samani’s predictions are noteworthy not just because he previously called Solana’s success, but because he accurately captures an industry inflection point: blockchain competition is shifting from “stacking features” to “refining market microstructure.”

The seven major upgrades sketch a clear path:

• Foundation: Alpenglow + MCL → ultra-fast confirmation
• Middleware: ACE + scheduler → application-defined execution
• Application layer: PropAMMs + aggregators + conditional liquidity → institutional-grade liquidity

When Solana can deliver Nasdaq’s speed, CME’s depth, and DeFi’s composability simultaneously, it ceases to be just a public chain—it becomes the physical and financial layer of the next-generation internet capital markets.

For Gate users, tracking the timing of code merges, testnet progress, and leading market maker migrations may prove more valuable in the long run than short-term price speculation. After all, when Kyle’s “greatest progress in history” lands, the narrative around SOL will be fundamentally rewritten.