Solana (SOL) proposes transition to common specification for protocol change review

Anza CEO Brennan Watt proposed on October 30 that Solana protocol changes be reviewed through a unified common specification rather than scattered across individual SIMD proposals and validator client code, with the Solana Foundation confirming on November 5 that discussions on specification unification and the procedural change have begun. The proposal aims to ensure that separate validator software implementations, such as those maintained by Anza and Firedancer, enforce identical network rules by consolidating change review in one place. Watt argued the current process has accumulated proposals while already-active rules remain fragmented across codebases and documents, creating inconsistencies in how the same behavior is described. The shift matters because Solana's multi-client roadmap depends on strict cross-implementation consensus, and specification drift could raise coordination and security risks as client diversity grows. What to watch next is whether SIMD reviewers and core developers formally adopt the specification-first process and how existing proposals are migrated into the unified spec.