Solana's Next Consensus Upgrade Aims to Cut Block Finality Time by Over 90%

The Solana Foundation has announced that its next consensus upgrade, Alpenglow, is currently in testing on the testnet. The update aims to significantly reduce the finality time of blocks on the Solana network.

According to the feature tracker, Alpenglow is pending activation on the testnet. This upgrade will replace the current Tower BFT consensus with a new voting protocol called Votor.

Votor eliminates the need for transactions to be sent to the blockchain as votes and instead enables direct communication between validators. The update will also reduce the finality time from around 12.8 seconds to approximately 150 milliseconds.

The Solana Foundation stated that this reduction in finality time will enable users to confirm transactions almost instantly, making it suitable for applications such as point-of-sale transactions.