Solana's Alpenglow Consensus Upgrade Enters Community Testing, Targets 100-150ms Transaction Speed

According to Anza, Solana's research and development organization, the Alpenglow consensus algorithm upgrade entered live testing on the community test cluster on May 11. Alpenglow redesigns Solana's core consensus mechanism, replacing the existing TowerBFT with new voting and data propagation systems called Votor and Rotor to reduce network latency.

Anza stated that the upgrade aims to reduce Solana's transaction processing speed from several seconds to approximately 100-150 milliseconds, while improving network efficiency and resilience. The organization described Alpenglow as "the biggest consensus change in Solana's history" and invited more validator operators to participate in the next community cluster phase.