Anza team has prepared a Solana upgrade to replace the consensus mechanism

What’s new? Anza, a development studio spun off from Solana Labs, has unveiled “the biggest change to Solana’s core protocol” ever. According to the announcement, the high-performance Layer 1 (L1) blockchain will get a completely redesigned consensus protocol part called Alpenglow.

Material by The Block

What else is known?

“We believe that the release of Alpenglow will be a turning point for Solana. Alpenglow is not only a new consensus protocol, but the biggest change to Solana’s core protocol since, well, ever,” Anza’s Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski, and Roger Wattenhofer wrote in a white paper published on Monday.

The upgrade replaces the existing TowerBFT proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and Solana’s proof-of-history timestamp system with new components called Votor and Rotor.

Votor (Voting Component) will drive the consensus logic and will replace TowerBFT. Instead of relying on the current gossip model of nodes, it will use a “faster direct communication primitive” to vote on the completion of a block. Nodes vote to certify a block, or skip it if it arrives late or is deemed untrustworthy.

A block can be validated in one round if 80% of participants approve it, or two rounds if 60% approve it, using parallel voting paths for faster and more scalable processing. Anza claims this could reduce block processing time to 100-150 milliseconds.

“I got nearly everything wrong about consensus, except the important parts: it can’t be in the way of block producers utilizing 100% of the bandwidth 100% of the time. Users need some deterministic finality in one round (2-delta).

Alpenglow nails both of these requirements with a simple and elegant design that’s really easy to intuit,” Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko wrote on X.

The second component, Rotor, enhances Solana’s existing blockchain distribution protocol. It builds on Turbine, the current system that breaks blocks into smaller pieces and distributes them across the network, by using a single layer of relay nodes and optimizing throughput usage based on staking. Like Turbine, Rotor uses “erasure-coding” to ensure that a block can be recovered from a subset of these fragments.

Anza is also the team behind the Solana Agave client.

This is the original network validation software.