Alpenglow: Rebuilding Solana’s Consensus For Sub-Second Finality

Alpenglow is live on Solana mainnet. Anza CEO Brennan Watt explains why the team started from ground zero to rebuild Solana's consensus, and what faster finality unlocks.

"You can't iterate your way into a better consensus in a way that is safe and performant." – Brennan Watt

Alpenglow replaces TowerBFT, the consensus protocol Solana has run since launch. Under TowerBFT, a block was final once a tower of votes stacked up over 32 slots, about 12.8 seconds. Alpenglow's new voting protocol, Votor, finalizes blocks in one or two rounds of voting and is built to bring finality down to ~150ms.

For users, nothing changes: same apps, same wallets, same fees. They shouldn't have to notice Alpenglow. They'll just feel it.

Chapters:

0:00 Starting from ground zero

0:16 What Alpenglow is

0:30 The problem with TowerBFT

0:57 Taking on traditional finance

1:22 What 150ms finality means

1:44 Going live on mainnet

1:57 What comes next

Anza: https://www.anza.xyz/alpenglow

Learn more: https://solana.com/upgrades/alpenglow

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