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99% of Solana Voters Back Alpenglow Upgrade to Push Finality to ~150 ms

Solana’s proposed Alpenglow consensus upgrade is on track to pass, with more than 99% of cast votes in favor so far. The governance vote has reached the quorum threshold, and with just two days left in the voting window the proposal appears likely to move forward.

Unveiled in May by Anza, a development team spun out of Solana Labs, Alpenglow aims to reduce transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds — a near 100-fold improvement that would put Solana’s finality latency on par with common Web2 services and faster than many competing layer-1 chains.

The formal governance process for Alpenglow began on Aug. 21. Data from vote trackers show over 99.6% of votes cast so far are “yes,” and the proposal has already met the 33% quorum requirement. Voting is scheduled to close at epoch 842, which is expected to finish at 13:00 UTC on the scheduled closing day.

Key components: Votor and Rotor

Alpenglow comprises two main components. Votor would handle voting transactions and block finalization logic, targeting single-round finality when roughly 80% of stake participates and two-round finality when about 60% of stake is responsive, replacing the existing TowerBFT mechanism. Rotor is a new data-dissemination protocol intended to replace Solana’s current proof-of-history timestamping approach and accelerate how quickly nodes converge on network state.

What Alpenglow won’t immediately fix

The upgrade is not presented as a cure-all for Solana’s historical availability issues. The Alpenglow white paper notes it would not completely eliminate the possibility of network outages. A related concern is the current lack of client diversity: Solana has only one production-ready client in mainnet use, Agave, meaning client-level vulnerabilities could still affect the network.

Client diversity may improve later in the year with the planned mainnet launch of the Firedancer validator client, which is expected to provide an independent implementation and reduce single-client risk for the network.

If implemented, Alpenglow would strengthen Solana’s positioning as one of the fastest layer-1 blockchains and could broaden its suitability for latency-sensitive applications beyond payments, trading and gaming.

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