Solana Targets Near-Instant Finality as Alpenglow Upgrade Heads to Vote

Solana developers are pushing a major consensus overhaul with the Alpenglow proposal, now in the validator voting stage. Just over 10% of validators have backed the upgrade as of European morning hours on Thursday, a tracker shows, with over 88% of eligible participants yet to cast their choice. If passed, it would replace Proof-of-History and TowerBFT with a faster, more resilient design centered on two new components: Votor and Rotor. Proof of history is Solana’s existing consensus mechanism. It timestamps transactions, allowing validators to determine the correct order without wasting time on syncing (which creates a slower network). TowerBFT is the network’s voting system. Validators use previous votes as a guide, helping them quickly agree on the next block while resisting attacks. The big draw in the new consensus proposal Votor, which would cut the time it takes for a transaction to be finalized from more than 12 seconds to around 150 milliseconds, making network confirmations feel effectively instant for users. Rotor, planned for a later stage, aims to make the network more efficient by reducing the number of times data needs to be transferred between validators — an upgrade designed to support high-activity applications, such as DeFi and gaming. Alpenglow also introduces a “20+20” resilience model, which promises to keep the chain running even if 20% of validators are adversarial and another 20% are offline. The proposal frames this as a step toward achieving faster speeds while enhancing security and fairness for validators.