Solana spin-off company Anza proposes the biggest change plan in the history of network consensus

Author: Brayden Lindrea, CoinTelegraph; Compilation: Baishui, Golden Finance

Anza, a Solana blockchain infrastructure company spin-off from Solana Labs, proposed a new Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism called Alpenglow, claiming that this will be "the biggest change in Solana's core protocol" and will compete with existing Internet infrastructure.

"We believe the launch of Alpenglow will be a turning point for Solana. Alpenglow is not only a new consensus protocol, but also the biggest change in the Solana core protocol to date," Anza's Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski and Roger Wattenhofer said on May 19.

Alpenglow consists of Votor (processing voting transactions and block finalization logic) and Rotor (a data propagation protocol), which will replace Solana 's historical proof timestamp system, aiming to reduce the time when all nodes agree on network state.

Anza researchers claim that “Alpenglow will push these two delay boundaries”, and the project expects its actual finality to be achieved in about 150 milliseconds, comparable to the internet infrastructure.

“The median latency of 150 [msec] means not only Solana is fast, but it also means Solana is comparable to Web2 infrastructure in terms of responsiveness, which has the potential to make blockchain technology suitable for completely new categories of applications that require real-time performance.”

The goal of Votor (will replace TowerBFT) is to complete block determination in one round if 80% of the equity participation is involved; if only 60% of the equity response is performed, the block determination is completed within two rounds.

These two voting modes integrate and operate simultaneously, and once one of the faster of the two paths terminates, the final confirmation will be done immediately.

Anza's researchers claim that this pattern will result in "unprecedented final confirmation delays" while allowing it to operate more efficiently under "harsh network conditions."

Alpenglow cannot resolve Solana's network outage issue

The project's white paper notes that switching to Alpenglow does not fully protect Solana from network disruptions experienced in the past.

Solana currently has only one production-ready client, Agave, which means that any security vulnerability in Agave can compromise the entire Solana network.

However, a new independent validator client called Firedancer will be available on Solana's mainnet sometime this year, which will provide a diverse client for the network.