Solana to Update Its Consensus Mechanism on October 21

Solana will activate Alpenglow on October 21, an update that will reduce the irreversibility time of transactions from 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds. The update will replace TowerBFT with a system that allows validators to agree on the validity of blocks in one or two rounds of voting. The first phase, Votor, will enable validators to send votes directly to each other and group them into certificates, requiring 80% participation to finalize a block in one round, or 60% in two. The second phase, Rotor, will introduce a relay layer, although it does not yet have an implementation date. Validators will need to use clients based on Agave 4.3.0 and maintain at least 0.8 SOL in their voting account. The migration could affect the metrics of transactions per second, although user operations will not be impacted. Alpenglow is already active on test networks, but its implementation on the main network carries risks associated with deep changes in consensus. The new model will tolerate up to 20% malicious participation and another 20% offline.

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