Solana, a top-10 cryptocurrency project, has announced a change to its consensus protocol to turbocharge the network’s performance. Alpenglow, the new implementation, reduces latency to near Web2 levels, making Solana capable of competing with Web2 providers.
Solana Aims to Compete With Web2 Providers With New Alpenglow Consensus Protocol
Solana, one of the largest, most used cryptocurrency protocols, has revealed a relevant change to increase the performance of its network and target new, previously unconsidered use cases. Anza, the Solana-focused developer group, announced Alpenglow, a new consensus protocol that aims to increase the bandwidth of the network while reducing its latency.
In a blog post explaining the changes coming to Solana, Anza details that legacy components of its core, like TowerBFT and Proof-of-History, will be deprecated and substituted with Votor and Rotor, which guarantee faster voting and finalization times.
Votor, which is the voting component of Alpenglow, optimizes the finalization of blocks depending on the percentage of stake participating. In the same vein, Rotor, another component of the new protocol, optimizes data dissemination compared to the previous implementation.
Also, Alpenglow introduces increased resilience measures to allow the network to operate under harsh conditions, where up to 20% of the stake operates as adversary to the network.
Anza expects these new additions to allow Solana to achieve transaction finalization in 100-150 milliseconds, a reduction of 100x that opens new use cases for the network.
It explained:
A median latency of 150 ms does not just mean that Solana is fast — it means Solana can compete with Web2 infrastructure in terms of responsiveness, potentially making blockchain technology viable for entirely new categories of applications that demand real-time performance.
The applications might potentially include on-chain gaming systems, faster Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN), and other operations that need fast finalization, currently only provided by traditional providers.
The consensus protocol is already in its prototyping stages and will come to Solana’s testnet in months. The rollout of Alpenglow will be decided through a Solana Improvement Document (SIMD) proposal sometime later this year.
