Solana to launch "Alpenglow" consensus upgrade aiming for sub-second finality

PANews reported on January 4 that Delphi Digital stated Solana plans to roll out a major consensus mechanism upgrade called “Alpenglow” in phases from early to mid-2026, replacing the current Tower BFT and Proof of History (PoH) mechanisms. This upgrade aims to achieve a finality time of 100–150 milliseconds, which is about 100 times faster than the original 12.8 seconds. The new architecture introduces two main components: Votor, which uses a lightweight vote aggregation model allowing blocks to reach finality within one to two rounds of confirmation; and Rotor, which restructures the block propagation mechanism by adopting a stake-weighted relay path, enabling propagation delays as low as 18 milliseconds under sufficient bandwidth.