1-9-2025 – Solana’s Alpenglow consensus protocol is virtually certain to pass after securing overwhelming support from validators, with over 99.6% voting in favor of the upgrade that would reduce transaction finality from 12.8 seconds to just 150 milliseconds.

The governance vote, which began August 21, reaches its conclusion Tuesday at 1 PM UTC having already surpassed the required 33% quorum threshold. The proposed upgrade represents Solana’s most significant protocol enhancement to date, promising a nearly 100-fold speed improvement that would rival standard internet infrastructure performance, according to Staking Facilities data.

Developed by Anza, a firm spun out of Solana Labs, Alpenglow introduces two core components: Votor for processing voting transactions and block finalization, and Rotor for data dissemination to replace the current proof-of-history system. The upgrade would position Solana ahead of competing layer-1 networks like Sui, which achieves 400-millisecond finality, and potentially match Google search response times of roughly 200 milliseconds.

The enhanced speed could expand Solana’s utility beyond current use cases in payments, trading, and gaming into real-time applications previously dominated by Web2 infrastructure. However, Anza researchers noted the upgrade won’t eliminate Solana’s vulnerability to network outages, which stem from reliance on a single production client called Agave.

The network expects improved stability later this year with the mainnet launch of Firedancer, an independent validator client that will provide crucial diversification.