The "strongest upgrade in history" of Solana has arrived! Alpenglow replaces PoH Consensus, completing final confirmation within 0.15 seconds.

Solana infrastructure Anza proposed the Alpenglow consensus protocol, which aims to revolutionize Solana's old PoH consensus, greatly improve transaction speed and responsiveness, and challenge the Visa-level performance of Web2. (Synopsis: Solana will welcome SIMD-0123 and 0228 upgrades, and validator revenue may shrink by 95%?) (Background supplement: Behind the undervalued Solana DeFi: How to break the "ecological internal friction" between high-yield pledges and lending agreements? Since its launch in 2020, the high-performance public blockchain Solana network has been known for its superior transaction speed and low fees, and it occupies an important position in today's blockchain, even though competitor Ethereum has been considered less threatening than in the past, but that hasn't stopped Solana from continuing to pursue extreme performance. Anza, which recently spun off the original Solana Labs team to focus on infrastructure development, announced an important proposal that could affect the Solana network - the new consensus protocol Alpenglow will replace PoH (Proof of History), Anza emphasized that this will be the "biggest change" since the creation of the Solana core protocol. Alpenglow: Solana Next Generation Consensus Anza Corporation recently announced Alpenglow, a new consensus protocol with the core goal of significantly improving transaction processing speed and system confirmation latency on the Solana network, which is expected to reach a level comparable to the current Web2 application infrastructure. Anza's briefing in a speech pointed out that the current PoH block final confirmation time (that is, the interval between determining that the latest block will no longer change the data), Solana falls on about 12.8 seconds, and after the introduction of optimistic consensus, it can be shortened to about 0.5~0.6 seconds, but the launch of Alpenglow only takes 0.15 seconds to complete, it is worth mentioning that Ethereum is about 15 minutes, which makes the upgraded Solana TRANSACTIONS ARE THEORETICALLY GOOD ENOUGH TO RIVAL HUGE CENTRALIZED PAYMENT SYSTEMS SUCH AS VISA. Votor and Rotor: Anatomy of Alpenglow's dual-core engine To explain what Alpenglow is, this consensus protocol is mainly composed of two key components: Votor and Rotor. First, Votor handles voting transactions and the logic of block finalization (block finalization), and is designed to replace Solana's current TowerBFT consensus mechanism. According to Anza researchers, Votor, through an optimized voting mechanism, expects that under the ideal situation of majority staking participation, only one or two rounds of voting can be completed, thereby greatly reducing the confirmation time. Second, Rotor plays the role of a new data propagation protocol to replace Solana's original historical proof (Proof-of-History, PoH) timestamp system. Rotor's design builds on the existing Turbine propagation protocol, utilizes erasure coding (erasure codes) technology for data distribution, and employs a single-layer relay node architecture. This design is designed to reduce the number of node hops required for data propagation by (hops), thereby improving the overall resiliency of the network and optimizing bandwidth usage efficiency. Anza researchers further pointed out that in combination with the operation of Votor and Rotor, the Alpenglow protocol is expected to compress the actual block finalization time to about 150 milliseconds, achieving extremely low finalization latency. Not only that, they also emphasized that Alpenglow can still operate efficiently under harsh network conditions, and can tolerate up to 20% of malicious node stakes, and an additional 20% of unresponsive node stakes, showing strong "20+20 resilience". Alpenglow's Potential: Challenging Web2 Speed and Future Applications Once the Alpenglow protocol is successfully deployed and running reliably, the Solana network will be better equipped to compete with existing Web2 application infrastructure in terms of processing speed and system responsiveness. This not only helps solidify Solana's leading position as a high-speed blockchain, but also has the potential to spawn a range of innovative blockchain applications that require a high level of real-time performance. However, while Alpenglow has shown great promise in improving network performance, Anza admits that the agreement still does not directly solve the occasional service interruption problem of the Solana network in the past. Anza also explains that the root cause of such problems is that Solana currently relies heavily on a single authenticator client called Agave in production. This single-client architecture inevitably increases the risk of a single point of failure, and any client-level security breaches or errors can have an impact on the stability of the entire network. In response to this critical issue, an independent development team is actively working on a new authenticator client called Firedancer, which is expected to go live on the Solana mainnet later this year. The introduction of Firedancer will bring the long-awaited client diversity to the Solana ecosystem, effectively diversify potential risks, and fundamentally improve the overall robustness of the network, which is an important complement to the performance enhancement brought by the Alpenglow protocol. Alpenglow's prototype is currently in internal testing, with plans to integrate into the Solana testnet for wider validation in the coming months. Whether it can be deployed on the mainnet is subject to subsequent Solana Improvement Document (SIMD) proposal deliberation and community consensus and approval. It is worth noting that Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana, has publicly expressed support for Anza's proposal, which partly reflects the positive expectations of the core development community for the potential of Alpenglow's technology. However, how to ensure the stability of Alpenglow in actual operation and effectively combine the diversified efforts of clients such as Firedancer to comprehensively solve the network resilience problem will be a key challenge that Solana must overcome on its journey to an ultra-high-speed and high-reliability blockchain network. Related stories are coming! Solana second-generation mobile phone "Seeker" is expected to ship this summer, is there still an airdrop? Spec Features Quick Glance Solana's new ad "American Innovation, Don't Gender Innovation" is hot! Equal rights dispute quickly removed ETH saved? The Ethereum Foundation is considering "shifting its focus from research to investment", borrowing from Solana's successful model "Solana's "strongest upgrade in history"! Alpenglow replaces PoH consensus and completes final confirmation in 0.15 seconds" This article was first published in BlockTempo's "Dynamic Trend - The Most Influential Blockchain News Media".