Alpenglow to replace Solana consensus with one-slot finality

Solana is preparing to replace TowerBFT with Alpenglow: validators approved SIMD-0326 in September 2025 with 98.27% of stake, and the protocol has run on a community cluster for five months. The new Votor scheme finalizes a block in one slot instead of 32, removes vote transactions (54–59% of all network transactions) and adds a formal safety proof.

• Vote transactions make up 54–59% of mainnet transactions and cost ~2.16 SOL per epoch
• Votor uses 80% stake for fast finalization and 60% for the slow path
• Alpenglow is safe below 20% Byzantine stake and tolerates 40% crash faults
• Timeouts replace Proof of History: base timeout is 400 ms plus one block time per slot