Solana’s Alpenglow proposal, which seeks to slash the blockchain’s transaction finality to round 150 milliseconds, is predicted to proceed after 99% have voted in help of it, with simply two days left for voting.
The Alpenglow consensus protocol was unveiled in Might by Anza — a Solana improvement agency spun out of Solana Labs — and has been described by ecosystem members as the largest protocol improve in Solana’s historical past.
It might slash the present finality from 12.8 seconds to only 150 milliseconds, a close to 100-fold velocity improve that might put it on par with present web infrastructure.
The governance course of for Alpenglow kicked off on Aug. 21, and over 99.6% of votes solid up to now have stated “sure” to the proposal, Staking Amenities information reveals.
Voting will shut at epoch 842, which is predicted to be full on Tuesday at 1 pm UTC, in keeping with Solanabeach.io.
The quorum threshold of 33% of votes has additionally been reached, that means Alpenglow is now nearly sure to move if the present voter trajectory stays the identical.
A profitable implementation of Alpenglow would strengthen Solana’s case as one of many quickest layer-1 blockchains, surpassing Sui — which has transaction finality round 400 ms — and probably even outperform normal Google searches, which return ends in roughly 200 ms.
Transaction velocity has been a key promoting level for layer-1 blockchains in search of to compete with Bitcoin and Ethereum, the latter of which incorporates transactions in round 12 or 13 seconds however doesn’t attain finality till roughly 12 minutes later.
Alpenglow might broaden Solana’s use instances far past funds, buying and selling and gaming, Anza researchers Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski and Roger Wattenhofer stated in Might when the white paper was launched.
“A median latency of 150 doesn’t simply imply that Solana is quick — it means Solana can compete with Web2 infrastructure by way of responsiveness, probably making blockchain expertise viable for completely new classes of purposes that demand real-time efficiency.”
Alpenglow contains Votor and Rotor
The primary of Alpenglow’s key parts is Votor, which might course of voting transactions and block finalization logic, aiming to finalize blocks in a single spherical if 80% of the stake is collaborating, and in two rounds if solely 60% of the stake is responsive. It might substitute TowerBFT.
The second is Rotor, an information dissemination protocol that might substitute Solana’s proof-of-history timestamping system and intention to cut back the time it takes for all nodes to agree on the community state.
1/ Rotor is Solana’s new block propagation protocol launched within the Alpenglow improve. It’s a single layer of relayers that replaces Turbine’s multi-hop, delivering blocks sooner and extra uniformly throughout the community 🧵 pic.twitter.com/0KhpLuLe8u
— Anza (@anza_xyz) August 13, 2025
Alpenglow gained’t repair Solana’s community outages
The venture’s white paper famous that switching to Alpenglow wouldn’t fully defend Solana from the community outages that it has skilled prior to now.
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Solana at present solely has one production-ready shopper, Agave, that means any safety vulnerability in Agave can disrupt all the Solana community.
Nevertheless, a brand new unbiased validator shopper known as Firedancer is ready to launch on Solana’s mainnet later this yr, which is able to present shopper diversification for the community.
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