Standard
Redesigned consensus protocol for Solana that replaces the network's voting mechanism with aggregated BLS signatures and a capped consensus set.
Solana validators approved SIMD-0326, the Alpenglow consensus swap, with 98.27% of participating stake in favor. According to Solana Compass, votes are 54% to 59% of mainnet transactions today. Under Alpenglow they stop being transactions.
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Solana swaps TowerBFT for Alpenglow on Oct. 21, targeting finality in about 150 milliseconds. CoinDesk reported that vote transactions leave blocks, so counts may fall sharply with user activity unchanged.
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Solana plans to activate Alpenglow on mainnet around 15:00 UTC on October 21, cutting finality from about 12.8 seconds to a target near 150 milliseconds. Decrypt's Morning Minute says exchanges and payment processors have built around the old window of roughly 13 seconds.
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Solana fell 9.34% in seven days to about $107 before its October 21 Alpenglow upgrade, according to crypto.news. The one ETF flow it cites, $1.04 million on October 13, is about 0.0017% of market capitalization.
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Solana cuts its target block time to 200 milliseconds on Friday and shrinks each block to 30 million compute units, so total capacity stays flat. Validators pay for the faster clock by voting about twice as often as under the original 400-millisecond design.
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Anza researchers propose ordering Solana's block producers by self-reported location, cutting modeled mean handover delay from 36.2 to 17.0 milliseconds. The chain can verify who signed a location but not where the hardware sits, so the speedup depends on operators reporting honestly.
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Anza researchers' SIMD-0675 would schedule Solana validators by registered location, cutting simulated handover delays 53%, to 17.0 milliseconds. Every validator would keep its share of slots, so what operators pay for faster handovers is disclosure of where their machines run.
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Anza moved Solana's testnet and devnet to Alpenglow on Sept. 24 and 25, cutting finality from about 12.8 seconds to a 100 to 150 millisecond target. Mainnet-beta follows an observation period with no date set, the window exchanges and app teams have to retest what they count as settled.
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Solana moved block production from 300 milliseconds to 250 on Friday. The network now makes four blocks a second instead of 3.33, each one allowed about 17% less computation, with total capacity unchanged.
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Solana's byte price has fallen 27% with three cuts still to come, leaving accounts funded at the old 6,960 lamports per byte holding a surplus that four programs let their own authority take back without closing anything.
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Four SIMDs put commission into basis points and let validators split priority fees with delegators. The sharing is opt-in. The whole-percent field RPC still publishes rounds up, so a move of up to 99 basis points can hide behind it.
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The consensus set under Alpenglow is the top 2,000 vote accounts by stake, and the filter checks for a BLS public key in vote state before it considers stake at all. Each admitted seat pays 1.6 SOL an epoch.
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