A Major Update is Coming to Solana (SOL): Here’s What Will Change if Approved

A new consensus proposal, Alpenglow (SIMD-0326), has been put out to community vote in the Solana ecosystem. The proposal aims to reduce block finality on the network from the current 12.8 seconds to approximately 150 milliseconds.

Voting will occur between Epochs 840 and 420. Each epoch lasts approximately two days on the network, which is currently at Epoch 834. A proposal must receive at least 66% of the votes cast in favor of “yes” for it to be accepted.

Solana’s management announcement described Alpenglow as a modern architecture that prioritizes performance, durability, and simplicity, replacing the existing Proof-of-History and TowerBFT mechanisms.

At the heart of the new protocol, Votor offers a lightweight framework based on direct voting. Blocks are finalized using single or double rounds of voting, depending on network conditions. This reduces block confirmation times from 12.8 seconds to 100–150 milliseconds. It also eliminates heavy gossip traffic, improving bandwidth efficiency.

Additionally, a new data propagation protocol called Rotor will be introduced in a future update. The current phase only covers finalization and voting logic.

*This is not investment advice.

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