Anza’s Alpenglow proposal introduces Solana’s most important protocol upgrade, replacing traditional systems with voters and rotors to cut transaction terminals to 100-150ms, which is expected to improve speed, security and scalability in 2025.
Alpenglow cuts Solana deals final delay, 100 times less
On May 19, 2025, Anza, a research team centered on Solana, unveiled AlpenglowThis is the biggest proposed upgrade in Solana’s history.
1/Introduce the largest SOLANA protocol change ever: Alpenglow, a new consensus protocol conceived by the ANZA research team. Farewell Tower BFT and historical proof. Say hello to voters and rotors 🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/kpnqxq1jbg
– anza (@anza_xyz) May 19, 2025
This new consensus protocol replaces Solana’s legacy mechanism, Tower BFT and Proof of History (POH), and uses two innovative components: voter and rotor.
voter If 80% of stakeholders (or 60% of participation) run both modes together, finalization is simplified and consensus is reached in a round of votes for optimal speed.
Source: Alpenglow White Paper
Rotor Data propagation is enhanced by perfecting Solana’s turbine model, thereby reducing network hops through a single-layer relay system and leveraging erased encoded data propagation for faster and more resilient transmission.
Alpenglow abandons gossip-based communications for direct messaging, minimizing latency. Solana’s 65% stake in Zurich was in 50 milliseconds and the final determination time dropped to 100-150ms, a 100-fold increase from the current 12.8 seconds.
The upgrade is designed to address Solana’s historical bottlenecks, such as leader overload, by optimizing bandwidth usage across individual nodes. Alpenglow also introduced a built-in repair and resynchronization approach that enhances the robustness of the network against power outages, an ongoing challenge to Solana, which has experienced multiple declines in 2022-2024, due to traffic congestion from validators.
The impact of Alpenglow on Solana’s performance and ecosystem
Alpenglow’s implementation is expected to change Solana’s operational efficiency, positioning it as a leader in blockchain performance. The sharp drop in transaction ending ability to 100-150ms makes Solana’s speed comparable to the Web2 infrastructure, enabling real-time applications such as gaming, high-frequency trading and mobile payments.
This fits Solana’s vision of vertical performance scaling, and contrasts with Ethereum’s summary-centric approach. The optimization of data propagation by the rotor ensures that leaders no longer bottleneck the system, allowing Solana to process its current 3,000 TP more efficiently and potentially scale to 65,000 TPS.
Upgrades can also enhance Solana’s security and resilience. Voters’ dual-mode voting tolerate up to 20% confrontation and 20% non-reactive equity, a “20+20” model that ensures consistent endurance even under degraded conditions.
However, because Solana’s dependency on a single validator client is still a vulnerability, Alpenglow will not completely eliminate the power outage.
The future of Alpenglow’s potential adoption of Solana
If Alpenglow is adopted by the Solana Improvement Document (SIMD) proposal later in 2025, Solana can redefine the 1st floor landscape.
This protocol is able to finalize the ability of block Solana in millisecond positions sol To compete directly with centralized systems, market share may be captured from Ethereum ethcurrently holds $77.15 billion in Defi TVL. Solana’s ecosystem has already flourished with $9 billion TVL and $4.78 million daily event addresses and may see exponential growth, especially in performance-sensitive applications.
Source: Defillama
However, there are still challenges. Compared to Ethereum’s 800,000, Solana’s 2,000 validators raise the centralization issue, where breaking history could undermine trust if Alpenglow fails to deliver.
If successful, Alpenglow could solidify Solana’s role as a high-performance blockchain, attracting institutions to adopt and consolidate its $2 trillion market cap trajectory, possibly surpassing competitors like BNB Chain or Tron.
