Delphi Digital: Solana's major upgrade Alpenglow is planned to launch in 2026, with theoretical confirmation delays potentially reduced by 100 times

ChainCatcher message, Delphi Digital posted on X platform stating that Solana is preparing a major upgrade called Alpenglow. This upgrade is a complete overhaul of the consensus mechanism, aiming to achieve sub-second finality by replacing Tower BFT and Proof of History (PoH). Alpenglow introduces two new protocol components: Votor and Rotor. Votor replaces the incremental voting rounds of Tower BFT with a lightweight voting aggregation model. Validators can aggregate votes off-chain before submitting final confirmations, allowing blocks to achieve finality within 1 to 2 confirmation rounds. This improvement reduces the theoretical finality latency to 100 to 150 milliseconds, approximately 100 times shorter than the initial 12.8 seconds. Votor achieves finality through two parallel paths: when a proposed block receives support from over 80% of total staked weight in the first round, it triggers fast confirmation and becomes effective immediately; if support is between 60% and 80%, it triggers slow confirmation, requiring more than 60% support in the second round to finalize. Rotor reengineers Solana’s block propagation layer. The original Turbine network relied on multi-hop relays with variable latency, while Rotor introduces a staking-weighted relay path, prioritizing bandwidth efficiency. Validators with high stake and reliable bandwidth will become core relay points. Simulations show that under typical bandwidth conditions, block propagation can be completed within 18 milliseconds. The upgrade is expected to be rolled out gradually, with initial deployment anticipated from early to mid-2026.