understanding Constellation

After Alpenglow, Anza dropped Constellation — a proposal that tackles one of the biggest fairness problems still left in block production.

Today, Solana uses a single leader model. Every few hundred milliseconds, one validator becomes the leader. Users send transactions directly to that leader, which gets to see everything first and decide what goes into the block and in what order.

This delivers strong performance, but it also creates a temporary monopoly on transaction ordering. Constellation takes a different approach.