99% favor Solana Alpenglow upgrade for 150ms finality, so far

Solana’s Alpenglow proposal, which seeks to slash the blockchain’s transaction finality to around 150 milliseconds, is expected to proceed after 99% voted in support of it, with just two days left for voting. 

The Alpenglow consensus protocol was unveiled in May by Anza — a Solana development firm spun out of Solana Labs — and has been by ecosystem members as the biggest protocol upgrade in Solana’s history. 

It would slash the current finality from 12.8 seconds to just 150 milliseconds, a near 100-fold speed increase that could put it on par with current internet infrastructure.

The governance process for Alpenglow kicked off on Aug. 21, and over 99.6% of votes cast so far have said “yes” to the proposal, Staking Facilities shows. 

Voting will close at epoch 842, which is expected to be complete on Tuesday at 1 pm UTC, to Solanabeach.io. 

The quorum threshold of 33% of votes has also been reached, meaning Alpenglow is now almost certain to pass if the current voter trajectory remains the same. 

A successful implementation of Alpenglow would strengthen Solana’s case as one of the fastest layer-1 blockchains, surpassing Sui — which has transaction finality around 400 ms — and potentially even outperforming standard Google searches, which return results in roughly 200 ms.

Transaction speed has been a key selling point for layer-1 blockchains seeking to compete with Bitcoin and Ethereum, the latter of which includes transactions in around 12 or 13 seconds but doesn’t reach finality until roughly 12 minutes later.

Alpenglow could far beyond payments, trading and gaming, Anza researchers Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski and Roger Wattenhofer said in May when the white paper was released.

“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, aiming 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. It would replace TowerBFT.

The second is Rotor, a data dissemination protocol that would replace timestamping system and aim to reduce the time it takes for all nodes to agree on the network state.

Alpenglow won’t fix Solana’s network outages

The project’s white paper noted that switching to Alpenglow wouldn’t from the that it has experienced in the past.

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Solana currently only has one production-ready client, Agave, meaning any in Agave can disrupt the entire Solana network.

However, a new independent validator client called Firedancer is set to launch on Solana’s mainnet later this year, which will provide client diversification for the network.

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