Solana's Alpenglow Upgrade: 150ms Finality

Solana's latest proposal, Alpenglow, has moved into the voting phase, aiming to upgrade the network's consensus mechanism. The proposal outlines a significant overhaul of Solana’s core consensus protocol. The goal is to transition from the current Proof-of-History and TowerBFT frameworks to a more efficient structure featuring two key components: Votor and Rotor. Votor, a direct-vote protocol, promises to cut block finality from 12.8 seconds to an impressive 150 milliseconds, allowing for quicker transaction confirmations. Meanwhile, Rotor is designed to enhance data dissemination, optimizing bandwidth and minimizing network hops, which is particularly advantageous for high-performance applications like DeFi and gaming. Votor is expected to launch with the initial rollout of Alpenglow, while Rotor will be implemented in a subsequent phase. Additionally, Alpenglow presents a "20+20" resilience model, ensuring network functionality even when 20% of validators are adversarial and another 20% are unresponsive. The proposal claims that Alpenglow reduces consensus latency to levels akin to Web2 applications while simultaneously bolstering the system’s security, scalability, and economic fairness. As of now, 10.09% of validators have voted in favor of the proposal, with 9.97% against it. It will require more than 33% of validators to meet the necessary quorum for approval. Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media source offering news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a primary investor in The Block, which operates independently to provide objective, timely insights into the crypto industry.