99% Back Solana’s Alpenglow Upgrade to Slash Transaction Finality to 150ms

Solana validators overwhelmingly support the SIMD-0326 Alpenglow consensus upgrade with 99.60% ￰0￱ revolutionary consensus mechanism would replace TowerBFT with a direct voting system, reducing block finality from 12.8 seconds to as low as 100-150 milliseconds while achieving Web2-level performance.) August 27, 2025 Major staking providers, including Jito, Marinade, and Blaze, recorded strong yes votes, while individual validators across stake ranges from 100,000 SOL to over 1 million SOL support the ￰1￱ proposal requires two-thirds majority approval with a 33% quorum threshold, including ￰2￱ Architecture Targets Sub-Second Block Finality Alpenglow represents a fundamental departure from Solana’s Proof-of-History and TowerBFT mechanisms, addressing performance limitations that impose long finality delays without formal safety ￰3￱ new architecture operates through discrete time slots with randomized, verifiable leader selection managing consecutive ￰4￱ collect transactions into blocks, split them into intermediate slices and smaller shreds, and initially distribute them via the existing Turbine ￰5￱ updates will replace the Turbine with a more efficient Rotor system, which will require separate SIMD approval for enhanced bandwidth optimization.

Moreover, off-chain voting eliminates current on-chain vote transaction requirements, removing significant bandwidth overhead, transaction fees, and processing costs.