Solana will launch the "Alpenglow" consensus upgrade, aiming to achieve sub-second finality confirmation

PANews January 4th News, Delphi Digital published an article stating that Solana plans to gradually roll out a major consensus mechanism upgrade called “Alpenglow” from early to mid-2026, replacing the existing Tower BFT and Proof of History (PoH) mechanisms. The upgrade aims to achieve finality times of 100–150 milliseconds, approximately 100 times faster than the original 12.8 seconds. The new architecture introduces two main components: Votor, which uses a lightweight voting aggregation model to allow blocks to reach finality within one or two confirmation rounds; and Rotor, which reconstructs the block propagation mechanism using an equity-weighted relay path, enabling propagation delays as low as 18 milliseconds under sufficient bandwidth.