Anza Proposes Biggest Change to Solana’s Core Protocol

Anza, the Solana blockchain infrastructure company spun off from Solana Labs, has proposed a new proof-of-stake consensus called Alpenglow. Alpenglow consists of Votor, which handles voting transactions and block finality logic, and Rotor, a data distribution protocol that will replace Solana’s proof-of-history timestamping system and aims to reduce the time it takes for all nodes to agree on the state of the network.

According to Anza’s researchers, Alpenglow will break latency limitations, achieving finality in about 150 milliseconds, rivaling the infrastructure of the Internet. Votor, which will replace TowerBFT, will aim to finalize blocks in a single round if 80% of the stake participates, and in two rounds if only 60% of the stake responds. The two voting modes are integrated and run concurrently, with finality occurring as soon as the faster of the two paths is complete.

The project's whitepaper notes that the move to Alpenglow will not fully protect Solana from the network outages it has experienced in the past. Solana currently only has one production-ready client, Agave, meaning that any security vulnerability in Agave could disrupt the entire Solana network. However, a new independent validator client called Firedancer is set to launch on the Solana mainnet this year, which will provide client diversity for the network.

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