The Solana Improvement Document 0326 (SIMD-0326), dubbed Alpenglow, has entered into the community voting phase. If passed, the upgrade would be a huge implementation for Solana, pushing the blockchain’s consensus into true sub-second finality territory.
Driving a major shift, this upgrade will replace Solana’s existing Proof-of-History and TowerBFT mechanisms with a modern architecture focused on performance, resilience, and simplicity, according to the forum post.
The improved capability will open the door to new institutional use cases, high-speed DeFi infrastructures, and a real edge for high-frequency dApps.
Authored by Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski, and Roger Wattenhofer, the proposal will be live for community voting during Epochs 840 to 842, requiring two-third of voting to pass. At the time of publication, 11.3124% votes were in favor, while only 0.1211% votes were against the proposal, as per SIMD Votes Status.
Major Upgrade on Solana Infrastructure
Alpenglow is a significant upgrade for Solana. It aims to make a drastic change on Solana’s consensus by replacing the current block finalization process.
“At the heart of this new design is Votor, a lightweight, direct-vote-based protocol that finalizes blocks using either a single or dual-round voting process, depending on network conditions,” the proposal reads.
The proposed design significantly reduces block timing from 12.8 seconds to as low as 100-150 milliseconds, “while also improving bandwidth efficiency by eliminating heavy gossip traffic.” The protocol also introduces different types of certificates, corresponding to notarizating, skipping, or finalizing blocks based on validator votes.
Supporting this development, validators will cast their votes using cryptographic proofs to reach consensus. While the current rollout of Alpenglow focuses on finalization and voting logic, a new data dissemination protocol, Rotor, will be introduced in a later update.
Solana’s Expanding Capabilities
As a smart contract platform, Solana is already one of the fastest blockchain networks, with a real-time transactions per seconds (tx/s) count of 872.6, according to Chainspect data. If passed, Alpenglow will lead Solana to newer heights in the competitive landscape of high-speed, low fees blockchain industry.
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