Solana’s developers are planning what could be the most ambitious basic upgrade of the blockchain to date – the one that replaces its current technological battery with a redesigned consensus protocol designed for an almost instant -income purpose and responsiveness.
The new system, called Alpenglow, was unveiled on Monday by the infrastructure company Anza, a Spinout by Solana Labs.
It proposes to replace the proof of history – the famous “pre -recorded clock” system by Solana – and Tower BFT, its existing voting mechanism to reach consensus.
The BFT, or tolerance for Byzantine defects, is a means for a group of network nodes to agree on information even if some were elongated or broken.
The proof of history is one of the basic characteristics of Solana, a type of cryptographic “clock” so that the validators do not have to argue on the calendar during the registration of the data to the network – a shortcut which enormously accelerates the network but adds complexity.
Why change?
So why the change offered? Because the two systems are relatively slow and complex under the hood. Towerbft needs several voting cycles, and proof of history is based on a cryptographic clock that can lead to coordination delays. Alpenglow simplifies this with faster and more direct communication and faster consensus.
In their place comes a two -part solution:
1) Votor, which manages blocked finalization and can confirm transactions as little as 100 to 150 milliseconds (based on current simulations).
2) Rotor, a data relay protocol which aims to transmit transaction data faster and more effectively than the turbine, the current Diffusion Mechanism of Solana.
It is not only a technological flex, it has a direct impact on the experience of developers, the responsiveness of users and the types of applications which can natively operate on Solana, including real -time finances, games and social tools.
These implementations could, in turn, increase the activity on the chain and, by extension, the demand for a soil token.
The purpose in less than a second mark would a change of step for the layer 1 blockchains, most of which still operate on confirmation windows of several seconds. Solana has already experienced “optimistic confirmations” to reduce latency, but Alpenglow formalizes this in a protocol quickly proven.
The purpose means that a transaction is fully confirmed and cannot be modified or reversed, making it a permanent part of the blockchain.
According to its white paper, the Alpenglow Votor system could finalize blocks in a single voting round if 80% of the participation is online, or two rounds if only 60% are reactive, the two modes operating simultaneously to finalize on the fastest path.
On the other hand, the use of the rotor would allow less “hop”, selection of smarter relay nodes and a better bandwidth distribution to quickly push the data around the network – critical to keep the times of block quickly without counting on a central bottleneck.
A hop is a step that a data item takes when it goes from a computer (or node) to another on a network.
Tuesday, no launch date has been confirmed. But for Solana, it is more than just upgrade – it is a bet on speed as the identity of the chain. If it works, it could reaffirm Solana’s position not only as the fastest L1, but as one of the only fast for use cases in real time.
Read more: Solana pushes validators to test the upgrade “Firedancer” early
