The Solana network announced the implementation of the new consensus protocol Alpenglow.
Thanks to it, the finalization of blocks has increased to 150 ms.
According to Anatoly Yakovenko, Alpenglow is the best thing that has happened to Solana.
The Solana blockchain introduced Alpenglow — a new consensus protocol that, according to the team, will be the biggest change since the network's inception. Alpenglow is designed to make Solana the fastest global blockchain network suitable for real-time applications, achieving block finalization in just 150 ms.
“Almost everything I thought about consensus turned out to be false — except for two things: it should not prevent block producers from using 100% of the bandwidth, and users should have finalization in one round. Alpenglow meets both requirements,” stated Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
According to the statement, Alpenglow removes old components like TowerBFT and Proof-of-History. They have been replaced by Votor — a new voting and block finalization logic, as well as Rotor — a data dissemination protocol that enhances the ideas of Turbine. Rotor allows for maximum utilization of the bandwidth of all nodes, minimizing latencies.
Instead of ‘gossip,’ Alpenglow uses direct communications that further reduce latencies.
The voting model in Votor allows finalization to be completed:
in one round, if 80% of the stake participates;
in two rounds, if 60% of the stake is active.
Both paths work simultaneously, and a block is considered finalized immediately after the completion of the fastest one.
“Alpenglow is a protocol that can finalize blocks in 100-150 ms with the current distribution of nodes in the network. This elevates Solana to the speed level of Web2 infrastructure,” the presentation states.
Moreover, the new protocol has a ‘20+20’ fault tolerance: up to 20% of nodes can be malicious, and another 20% can be unavailable, without disrupting the functioning of the network. This ensures stability even in an aggressive environment.
“There are no words in human languages to describe how much easier it is to work with Alpenglow. Instead of an era of unconfirmed blocks — just two. This simplifies analysis and security exponentially,” added Yakovenko.
The Solana team also published a white paper detailing the workings of Alpenglow, including intuition, pseudocode, simulations, and formal proofs of correctness.
Recall that recently the Solana Foundation eliminated vulnerabilities that allowed attackers to forge proof of ownership and issue private tokens Token-22.
