Solana targets 150-millisecond finality as Alpenglow upgrade proposal enters voting phase

Solana's Alpenglow, the latest proposal to upgrade the network's consensus mechanism, has entered the community voting phase.

"Alpenglow is a major overhaul of Solana’s core consensus protocol," the proposal states. 

The proposal seeks to replace the existing Proof-of-History and TowerBFT mechanisms with a more efficient architecture, introducing two key components: Votor and Rotor.

Votor is a direct-vote protocol that reduces block finality from 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds, allowing users to experience faster transaction confirmations. Rotor is a data dissemination protocol that optimizes bandwidth by reducing network hops, making it ideal for high-performance applications such as DeFi and gaming.

While Votor is expected to go live as part of Alpenglow's initial rollout, Rotor's implementation is planned for a later stage, according to the proposal.

Alpenglow also introduces a "20+20" resilience model, ensuring that the network remains operational even if 20% of validators are adversarial and an additional 20% are unresponsive.

"In short, Alpenglow brings consensus latency to a level comparable with Web2 applications while strengthening the system’s security posture, scalability, and economic fairness," the proposal said.

According to the official website, 10.09% of validators have so far voted in favor of the proposal, with 9.97% voting against it. The proposal requires more than 33% of validators to vote in order to meet its quorum.

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