# Solana Proposal Would Put Shared Specification at Center of Protocol Changes

By Simon Yoon

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/50843
Published: 2026-11-07T13:21:41.000Z
Updated: 2026-11-07T13:21:41.000Z
Section: Technology

> The draft has 18 chapters and uses Mainnet epoch 1072 as its reference point. No adoption decision or implementation date has been set.

Solana developers are considering a shared protocol specification to give network changes one technical record, while retaining the reviews and approvals used in the existing proposal process.

Anza CEO Brennan Watt opened the discussion Oct. 30. “The proposed process makes the protocol change itself the proposal,” Watt wrote. The idea remains under discussion and has not changed Solana’s rules.

SIMD Discussions would remain the starting point for ideas. Detailed changes would then be submitted as pull requests to the shared specification. Technical review, contributor approvals and any required governance approval would stay in place. The pull request would merge when the change becomes active on Mainnet.

The current SIMD process documents proposals individually. Watt’s rationale for a shared record is that descriptions of protocol behavior can vary across proposals, making it harder to see every part of the network affected by a change. He also said new contributors may have to infer rules from client software. A common specification would set out requirements for developers working on independent implementations.

The draft has 18 chapters covering topics such as transactions, networking, state transitions and consensus. It uses Mainnet epoch 1072 as its reference and assumes either a trusted snapshot from that epoch or another state authenticated to the epoch’s root. The document does not define the first bank of epoch 1073, and it says a later Mainnet activation would require a revised specification.

A commenter, alnoki, asked whether a written document could miss interactions present in client implementations. Watt replied that some changes may need a prototype implementation alongside the specification to provide confidence. Watt’s exchange with the commenter did not set out testing requirements.

If developers broadly agree, Watt’s proposed next steps are to update SIMD-0001, which describes the proposal process, and decide on the baseline specification and where to host it. The discussion sets no adoption decision or implementation date.