Solana validators are currently voting on governance proposal SIMD-0326, which would implement the revolutionary Alpenglow consensus protocol to replace the existing TowerBFT system. The upgrade promises to slash block finality times from 12.8 seconds to 100-150 milliseconds – a 98% reduction – through Votor, a new voting mechanism that finalizes blocks in one or two rounds.
The proposal addresses critical TowerBFT limitations including slow confirmation times and security guarantee gaps. Alpenglow introduces off-chain voting with cryptographic signature aggregation, eliminating bandwidth-intensive gossip messaging while maintaining a "20+20" resilience model that keeps the network operational even if 20% of validators are adversarial and another 20% unresponsive.
A controversial Validator Admission Ticket fee of 1.6 SOL per epoch (to be burned) replaces on-chain voting transactions, maintaining economic barriers but raising concerns about validator accessibility. Voting spans epochs 833-842 and requires a two-thirds majority for approval, with community debate intensifying over economic impacts and implementation risks.
The timing coincides with Solana processing 35 million daily transactions – exceeding most regional stock exchanges – as it targets Nasdaq's scale. While Nasdaq executes 2,290 trades/second versus Solana's 402, developers believe Alpenglow's Web2-grade performance could close this gap.