With over 99% of cast votes in favor, Solana’s Alpenglow protocol appears poised to pass. The proposal aims to bring Solana’s transaction finality to speeds comparable to a Google search.
Solana’s Alpenglow proposal, which aims to reduce the blockchain’s transaction finality to about 150 milliseconds, is expected to move forward. This follows a vote in which 99% of participants were in favor of the measure, with two days remaining in the voting period.
The Alpenglow consensus protocol was unveiled in May by Anza, a Solana development firm that was spun out of Solana Labs. It has been described by members of the ecosystem as the most significant protocol upgrade in the history of Solana.
The current finality of 12.8 seconds would be slashed to just 150 milliseconds. This is a nearly 100-fold increase in speed, which could bring it on par with the current internet infrastructure.
The governance process for Alpenglow began on August 21, and so far, over 99.6% of the votes cast have been in favor of the proposal, according to Staking Facilities data.
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Voting is set to conclude at epoch 842, which is expected to be completed on Tuesday at 1 pm UTC, according to Solanabeach.io.
The quorum threshold of 33% of votes has been reached, which means Alpenglow is now almost certain to pass if the current voter trajectory remains unchanged.
A successful implementation of Alpenglow would strengthen Solana’s case as one of the fastest layer-1 blockchains. It would surpass Sui, which has a transaction finality of about 400 ms, and could potentially outperform a standard Google search, which returns results in approximately 200 ms.
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Transaction speed has been a key selling point for layer-1 blockchains that are trying to compete with Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum, in particular, includes transactions in about 12 to 13 seconds, but finality is not reached until around 12 minutes later.
When the white paper was released in May, Anza researchers Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski, and Roger Wattenhofer stated that Alpenglow could expand Solana’s use cases well beyond payments, trading, and gaming.
“A median latency of 150 does not just mean that Solana is fast — it means Solana can compete with Web2 infrastructure in terms of responsiveness, potentially making blockchain technology viable for entirely new categories of applications that demand real-time performance.”
Alpenglow Includes Votor and Rotor
The first of Alpenglow’s key components is Votor, which would process voting transactions and block finalization logic. It aims to finalize blocks in a single round if 80% of the stake is participating, and in two rounds if only 60% of the stake is responsive. Votor would replace TowerBFT.
The second is Rotor, a data dissemination protocol that would replace Solana’s proof-of-history timestamping system. It would aim to reduce the time needed for all nodes to agree on the network’s state.
Alpenglow Won’t Fix Solana’s Network Outages
The project’s white paper noted that a switch to Alpenglow would not completely protect Solana from the network outages it has experienced in the past.
Solana currently has only one production-ready client, Agave, which means any security vulnerability in Agave can disrupt the entire Solana network.
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However, a new independent validator client, called Firedancer, is set to be launched on Solana’s mainnet later this year. This will provide client diversification for the network.
