New Solana Consensus ‘Alpenglow’ Enters Neighborhood Vote

Solana core builders have pushed a sweeping consensus overhaul, “Alpenglow” (SIMD-0326), into the ecosystem’s formal governance monitor, establishing a validator vote that, if permitted, would substitute TowerBFT and re-architect finality and validator incentives on mainnet-beta. The proposal’s authors—Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski, and Roger Wattenhofer—describe Alpenglow as “a serious overhaul of Solana’s core consensus protocol,” designed to supplant “the prevailing Proof-of-Historical past and TowerBFT mechanisms” with a design that targets block finalization “as little as 100–150 milliseconds.”