Green light for Alpenglow upgrade: Solana gears up for a Major overhaul

The Solana community has with overwhelming majority voted in favor of the Alpenglow upgrade.

The Solana community has voted in overwhelming majority in favor of the Alpenglow upgrade. This paves the network for the largest technical restructuring in its history.

After a two-week governance process, with more than half of validators casting their vote, it's clear: Solana will be upgraded with the Alpenglow upgrade. 98.27% of SOL stakers who participated in the vote voted for the new consensus protocol, only 1.05% voted against and 0.69% abstained. In total, 52% of the network's stakers participated in the vote.

The components of Alpenglow, named Votor and Rotor, will replace Solana's TowerBFT and Proof-of-History system.

Votor will cut transaction processing time from more than 12 seconds to around 150 milliseconds and provide users with near-instant finality. Rotor, planned for introduction at a later date, will minimize data transfer times between validators. This marks a crucial improvement for DeFi apps and blockchain gaming.

"At these speeds, Solana could reach Web2-level responsiveness with L1 finality and unlock new use cases that require both speed and cryptographic security," says the Solana Foundation. "The combined effect of these initiatives and many others within the Solana ecosystem is a financial infrastructure that runs at internet speed."

With approval, Solana is now preparing for the upgrade's deployment. Officially, there is not yet a fixed date for activation on mainnet, but it could happen by the end of the year.

The Solana price move reflected the news as well. Over the past 24 hours, SOL is up nearly 2.5%.