Solana stakers overwhelmingly approved Alpenglow, a major upgrade designed to cut finality times to milliseconds and increase throughput by 100x.
Posted September 3, 2025 at 9:48 am EST.
Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade has officially cleared its governance vote, with over 98% approval from network stakers, comfortably exceeding the 33% quorum it required to pass.
The upgrade paves the way for the implementation of a major overhaul that will drastically increase transaction speed and network responsiveness.
Alpenglow introduces a new consensus protocol designed to boost transaction throughput by approximately 100-fold. It replaces Solana’s existing TowerBFT and Proof-of-History systems with two new components: Votor and Rotor.
Votor cuts transaction finality to as low as 150 milliseconds, down from over 12 seconds, enabling near-instant confirmations. Rotor replaces the network’s Proof-of-History timestamping and substantially reduces data transfer times between validators.
This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.
Subscribe here to get these updates in your email for free
“The devs claim it’s [Alpenglow] like upgrading from a bicycle to a hyperloop – fast AF and built for the long haul,” noted X user Nomad.
“But hey, not all is rosy in paradise. Remember when ETH 2.0 was promised as the savior back in the day? Expectations were through the roof but delays and hiccups left many feeling rekt. Solana needs to avoid falling into that trap.”
