Anza
Anza, founded in 2024 as an independent spinout from Solana Labs by former core engineers in San Francisco, stewards core Solana protocol development including the Agave validator client. Formed to decentralize client development alongside Firedancer and Jito, Anza focuses on networking, runtime, consensus and performance improvements for the Solana network. Headquartered in San Francisco with a distributed engineering team, the firm was created with backing from Solana ecosystem stakeholders to ensure long-term protocol resilience and client diversity. Its work includes feature activation, testing and validator tooling used by the global validator set running mainnet. Operating as a research and engineering lab, Anza contributes open-source upgrades and performance research. Expect a low-level systems culture that prizes protocol correctness, validator empathy and shipping careful, high-impact changes for a live high-throughput network.