Solana targets 150-millisecond finality as Alpenglow upgrade proposal enters voting phase
Quick Take
- Solana’s Alpenglow proposal seeks to enhance the network’s consensus mechanism with a new, enhanced architecture.
- One key feature, Votor, is a direct-vote protocol that reduces block finality from 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds.
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.
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