100ms Confirmation, Staking Bandwidth Revolution: Alpenglow Sets Off Solana Performance Nuclear Explosion, Is It Really Killing Ethereum This Time?

On May 20, 2025, Anza, a company founded by Solana Labs executives and core engineers, announced what has been described as "the biggest change in the history of Solana's core protocol" – Alpenglow. This new architecture will replace the existing TowerBFT consensus mechanism and proof-of-history timestamp system with Votor and Rotor components, with the goal of making Solana faster, more stable, and competitive as a high-throughput Layer-1 blockchain, comparable to Internet infrastructure.

Here are two of the most important things about Solana's transformation.

· Votor Consensus Innovation: Votor replaces TowerBFT with a more efficient direct communication mode to accelerate block confirmation through parallel voting. When 80% of the staking nodes agree, the block can be confirmed within one round; When the staking ratio is 60%, two rounds of confirmation are required. This design reduces block processing time to 100-150 milliseconds, significantly improving transaction speed and network scalability.

· Rotor Block Propagation Optimization: Rotor has improved the Turbine system to improve block propagation efficiency through single-layer relay nodes and stake-based bandwidth optimisation. Combined with erasure coding, Rotor ensures that chunks can be quickly distributed and reconstructed from partial data fragments, further enhancing the performance and stability of the Solana network.

How big is it to change the consensus mechanism?

The consensus mechanism is the core pillar of blockchain technology, which directly determines the security, efficiency and decentralisation of the network, and its significance of change is a milestone in the history of blockchain development. Solana's existing TowerBFT consensus mechanism is known for its high throughput, but as the network scales rapidly, it faces challenges with transaction congestion and resource allocation efficiency.

Anza's Alpenglow plan to completely reinvent Solana's consensus mechanism by introducing Votor and Rotor components aims to address these pain points and further unlock the network's potential. Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski, and Roger Wattenhofer, members of Anza's core team, declared in the whitepaper, "The release of Alpenglow will be a turning point for Solana, not only as a new consensus protocol, but also as a key step for Solana to become an Internet infrastructure-level competitiveness."

The scale and impact of this change is comparable to Ethereum's historic transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Alpenglow not only optimised the block proposal and validation process, reduced transaction latency, but also improved the decentralisation and attack resistance of the network by redesigning the economic incentives.

What's more, it opens up new possibilities for Solana. It supports higher transaction throughput, lower fees, and a wider range of application scenarios, from DeFi to Web3 applications. The success of this change will directly determine whether Solana can gain the upper hand in the competition with Ethereum, and even challenge the position of traditional Internet infrastructure. As Anza envisions, Alpenglow is not just about upgrading technology, but about making Solana the cornerstone that underpins the next generation of the internet, redefining the role of blockchain in the global digital economy.