Catenaa, Wednesday, May 27, 2025-Anza, a developer studio spun out of Solana Labs, has proposed a sweeping upgrade to the Solana blockchain’s consensus mechanism, calling it the most significant change to the network’s protocol since its inception.
In a white paper released Monday, Anza introduced “Alpenglow,” a framework aimed at overhauling Solana’s consensus and block propagation systems to boost speed and scalability.
At the center of Alpenglow is a new consensus module named “Votor,” which would replace Solana’s existing TowerBFT proof-of-stake mechanism.
Votor allows nodes to operate two concurrent voting paths, a method designed to accelerate transaction processing and provide deterministic block finality. Under this system, blocks can be notarized in a single round if approved by 80% of the network’s stake, or in two rounds with 60% approval. Anza estimates this could cut block finalization times to as low as 100 milliseconds.
Anza’s proposal also includes “Rotor,” an upgrade to Solana’s Turbine block propagation protocol. Rotor introduces a simplified relay system that uses erasure coding and stake-weighted bandwidth to streamline block distribution, enhancing efficiency across the network.
The proposal received public endorsement from Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko, who said the changes fulfill critical requirements for maximizing bandwidth utilization and delivering rapid finality.
Anza maintains Solana’s original Agave validator client and continues to lead core protocol development efforts.
The Alpenglow upgrade remains in the proposal phase and would require community consensus before deployment.
