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Solana's original proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, which finalizes blocks through a chain of on-chain validator votes.
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.
Reality
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 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.
Reality
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 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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