Anza, a blockchain infrastructure company that has spun off from Solana Labs, has put forward a groundbreaking proof-of-stake consensus named Alpenglow. This new development is slated to bring about a monumental shift in Solana’s core protocol and offer a strong competition to the existing internet infrastructure.
According to Anza’s Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski and Roger Wattenhofer on May 19, the introduction of Alpenglow is poised to be a game-changer for Solana. It’s not just a new consensus protocol, but also the most significant modification to Solana’s core protocol since its inception.
At the heart of Alpenglow lie two components: Votor and Rotor. Votor handles voting transactions and block finalization logic, while Rotor is a data dissemination protocol set to supersede Solana’s proof-of-history timestamping system. Its aim is to minimize the time required for every node to agree on the network state.
Research from Anza suggests that Alpenglow can significantly break these latency bounds, with the project predicting an achievement of actual finality in approximately 150 milliseconds, a speed on par with internet infrastructure. The researchers further noted that a median latency of 150 milliseconds implies Solana’s capability to compete with Web2 infrastructure in terms of speed, potentially opening doors for new application categories demanding real-time performance.
Votor, planned to replace TowerBFT, will likely finalize blocks in one round if 80% of the stake participates, and in two rounds if only 60% of the stake responds. These two voting methods are integrated and run simultaneously, with finalization occurring as soon as the quicker of the two paths concludes.
The researchers at Anza stated that this model would yield “unprecedented finalization latency” and allow it to function more effectively even under challenging network conditions.
Despite the promise of Alpenglow, it’s important to note that its implementation will not fully protect Solana from the network outages it has previously experienced. Solana currently relies on a single production-ready client, Agave. Any security vulnerability in Agave could still disrupt the entire Solana network. However, a new independent validator client named Firedancer is set to debut on Solana’s mainnet this year, which will offer client diversification for the network.
