Innovation of Blockchain Technology between Ethereum and Solana

Ethereum is undergoing supply-side reform. After the dreams of an infinite garden were shattered, Vitalik began to constrain the development of L2/Rollup, taking a more proactive stance to protect the L1 track. The "speed up and reduce costs" plan for the Ethereum mainnet has been put on the agenda, and the shift to Risc-V is just the beginning. How to catch up with or even surpass Solana in terms of efficiency will become the key task ahead.

Meanwhile, Solana continues to expand its consumption demand scenarios. Solana's strategy is "Scale or Die", steadfastly following the path of becoming a stronger L1. In addition to the Firedancer developed by a well-known trading company that has entered the deployment process, the Alpenglow consensus protocol from the Anza team gained widespread attention at the recent Solana conference in New York.

Interestingly, both Ethereum and Alpenglow share the ultimate dream of becoming the "world computer."

20% Security Consensus in the Era of Large-Scale Nodes

Since the birth of Bitcoin, the number of nodes and the degree of decentralization have been important indicators of the decentralization level of the blockchain network. To avoid excessive centralization, the security threshold is usually set at 33%, meaning that no single entity should exceed this proportion.

Driven by capital efficiency, Bitcoin mining has ultimately moved towards mining pool clusters, while Ethereum has become the main stage for certain large staking service providers and centralized exchanges. However, this does not mean that these entities can fully control the network's operation. In the model of "maintaining the network to earn incentives/management fees," they usually have no malicious motives.

However, assessing the health of a network must take its scale into account. For example, in a small group of only 3 people, a 2/3 consensus is required for it to be considered effectively operating. Simply pursuing an arbitrary minimum security guarantee of 1/3 is meaningless, as the remaining two can easily collude, making the cost of wrongdoing very low while the benefits are very high.

In contrast, in a large-scale network with 10,000 nodes, there is no need to pursue a 2/3 majority. Beyond the existing incentive model, most nodes do not know each other, and the coordination costs for collusion between large staking service providers and exchanges are also too high.

So, if we appropriately reduce the number of nodes and the consensus ratio, can we achieve "speeding up and reducing costs"?

Alpenglow is based on this idea. It plans to maintain a scale of about 1500 nodes for Solana while reducing the security consensus to 20%. This not only improves the node confirmation speed and allows nodes to earn more mainnet incentives but also encourages the expansion of node scale to around 10,000.

Whether this approach will produce an effect of 1+1>2, or whether it will break through the bottom line of existing security mechanisms, remains to be seen. However, this line of thought aligns well with Solana's positioning as a competitor to Ethereum, taking a technical route different from Ethereum.

Alpenglow: Improved Turbine or Moving Towards DPoS?

The theoretical basis of Alpenglow is that in the era of large-scale nodes, a high consensus quantity is not required. Due to the existence of the PoS mechanism, malicious actors would need to deploy enormous capital to control the network. Even at a scale of 20%, at current prices, Ethereum would require 20 billion USD, and Solana would also need 10 billion USD in funding.

Having such a large amount of capital, choosing other investment methods may be wiser, as trying to control the blockchain network seems unreasonable. Moreover, doing so would also face retaliation from the remaining 80% of nodes, unless it is an action at the national level.

In terms of specific implementation, Alpenglow roughly divides the entire process into three parts: Rotor, Votor, and Repair. To some extent, Alpenglow is a deep transformation of the Turbine mechanism.

Turbine is Solana's block broadcasting mechanism, responsible for disseminating block information to achieve consensus confirmation across all nodes. Compared to the Gossip protocol used by early Ethereum, Turbine adopts a more orderly dissemination method.

In Alpenglow, a similar mechanism is referred to as Rotor, which is essentially an orderly block message propagation method where no Leader or Relay nodes are fixed.

Votor is the node confirmation mechanism. In the vision of Alpenglow, if the first round of node voting reaches 80%, meeting the minimum requirement of over 20%, it can be directly and quickly passed. If the first round of voting is between 60% and 80%, a second round of voting can be initiated, and if it exceeds 60% again, it can be finally confirmed.

If consensus is still not reached, the Repair mechanism will be initiated. However, I personally believe this is similar to the challenge period of Optimistic Rollup; if it really comes to this, the protocol may face serious issues.

Unlike simply increasing hardware resources to improve bandwidth, Alpenglow's goal is to reduce the block consensus generation process. If data blocks can be kept small (around 1500 Bytes as they are now) and the generation time is sufficiently short (for example, achievable in extreme cases during current testing at 100ms, only 1% of the existing 10s), then the performance improvement will be significant.

Conclusion

After MegaETH, the existing L2 solutions have basically reached their limits. With SVM L2 unable to gain support from Solana, the Solana mainnet faces a real demand for continued expansion. Only by allowing the mainnet TPS to far exceed that of competitors can Solana truly realize its vision as an "Ethereum killer."

It is worth noting that Alpenglow can be applied not only to Solana, but theoretically, any PoS chain, including Ethereum, can adopt this mechanism. Similar to what was introduced earlier with Optimum, existing blockchain research has already reached the technical limits, and there is an urgent need for more support from computer science and even sociological concepts.

Once, IBM claimed that the world would only need five mainframes in the future. If we consider the internet built on HTTP-TCP/IP as one, Bitcoin as another, and Ethereum taking a seat, then there is indeed not much space left for Solana. However, technological development is often full of surprises, and we look forward to seeing whether Solana can break through through these innovations.