Anza’s Alpenglow proposal introduces Solana’s most significant protocol upgrade, replacing legacy systems with Votor and Rotor to slash transaction finality to 100-150ms, promising to enhance speed, security, and scalability in 2025.

Alpenglow Slashes Solana Transaction Final Latency with 100x Reduction

On May 19, 2025, Anza, a Solana-focused research team, unveiled Alpenglow, the largest proposed upgrade in Solana’s history.

1/ Introducing the largest Solana Protocol change ever: Alpenglow, Solana’s new consensus protocol conceived by the Anza Research team. Say goodbye to Tower BFT and Proof of History. Say hello to Votor & Rotor pic.twitter.com/KPNQxQ1jBg

— Anza (@anza_xyz) May 19, 2025

This new consensus protocol replaces Solana’s legacy mechanisms, Tower BFT and Proof of History (PoH), with two innovative components: Votor and Rotor. 

Votor streamlines block finalization, achieving consensus in a single round of voting if 80% of stakeholders, or two rounds with 60% participation, running both modes concurrently for optimal speed.

Source: Alpenglow whitepaper

Rotor enhances data dissemination by refining Solana’s Turbine model, reducing network hops with a single-layer relay system and leveraging erasure-coded data propagation for faster, more resilient transmission.

Alpenglow abandons gossip-based communication for direct messaging, minimizing latency. 65% of Solana’s stake is within 50ms of Zurich, with finalization times dropping to 100-150ms – a 100x improvement over the current 12.8 seconds. 

This upgrade aims to address Solana’s historical bottlenecks, such as leader overload, by optimizing bandwidth usage across nodes. Alpenglow also introduces built-in repair and re-sync methods, enhancing network robustness against outages, a persistent challenge for Solana, which faced multiple downtimes in 2022-2024 due to validator congestion.

Impact of Alpenglow on Solana’s Performance and Ecosystem

Alpenglow’s implementation promises to transform Solana’s operational efficiency, positioning it as a leader in blockchain performance. The drastic reduction in transaction finality to 100-150ms, brings Solana’s speed on par with Web2 infrastructure, enabling real-time applications like gaming, high-frequency trading, and mobile payments. 

This aligns with Solana’s vision of vertical performance scaling, contrasting Ethereum’s rollup-centric approach. Rotor’s optimization of data dissemination ensures that leaders no longer bottleneck the system, allowing Solana to handle its current 3,000 TPS more effectively, with the potential to scale toward 65,000 TPS.

The upgrade also strengthens Solana’s security and resilience. Votor’s dual-mode voting tolerates up to 20% adversarial and 20% non-responsive stake, a “20+20” model that ensures consistent finality even under degraded conditions. 

However, Alpenglow won’t fully eliminate outages, as Solana’s reliance on a single validator client remains a vulnerability.

The Future of Solana with Alpenglow’s Potential Adoption

If Alpenglow is adopted via the Solana Improvement Document (SIMD) proposal later in 2025, Solana could redefine the Layer-1 landscape. 

The protocol’s ability to finalize blocks in milliseconds positions Solana SOL to compete directly with centralized systems, potentially capturing market share from Ethereum ETH, which currently holds $77.15 billion in DeFi TVL. Solana’s ecosystem, already thriving with $9 billion in TVL and 4.78 million daily active addresses, could see exponential growth, especially in performance-sensitive applications.

Source: DefiLlama

However, challenges remain. Solana’s 2,000 validators raise centralization concerns compared to Ethereum’s 800,000+, and its history of outages could undermine trust if Alpenglow fails to deliver. 

If successful, Alpenglow could cement Solana’s role as a high-performance blockchain, attracting institutional adoption and solidifying its $2 trillion market cap trajectory, potentially outpacing competitors like BNB Chain or TRON.

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