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Solana is rolling out the most significant change to its core protocol since launch: a new consensus mechanism called Alpenglow.
This thread breaks down how Alpenglow works, how it compares to Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake, and what this means for developers, users, and investors.
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Alpenglow replaces Solana’s original Proof of History + Tower BFT consensus with two new components:
– Rotor, for fast block propagation
– Votor, for fast and simple voting
The goal is to improve throughput, simplify the protocol, and reduce time to finality by over 100×
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Under Alpenglow, Solana achieves finality in ~150 milliseconds.
This is deterministic finality. Once a transaction is confirmed, it is permanent. Not probabilistic, not “optimistic.”
It replaces Solana’s previous ~12.8s finality under Tower BFT and removes PoH entirely.
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Rotor uses erasure-coded shreds and one-hop relays to disseminate blocks efficiently.
Rather than relying on leader upload bandwidth or gossip trees, Rotor saturates total network bandwidth using stake-weighted relays. Result: faster propagation, lower latency.
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Votor replaces Tower’s vote locking and multi-round finality with a dual-mode process:
– If ≥80% of stake votes, block is finalized in one round
– If ≥60% votes, two rounds are run concurrently
Finality = min(δ₈₀%, 2×δ₆₀%), where δ = network delay among those % of stake.
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Transaction finality = when a transaction becomes irreversible
It matters because until then, it can be censored, reordered, or dropped in a fork
Finality is key to censorship resistance and off-chain trust
Solana now finalizes in ~0.15s Ethereum takes ~12.8 minutes (2 epochs)
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Block production time:
– Solana (Alpenglow): 400ms fixed slots
– Ethereum: 12s slots
Throughput:
– Solana: 1,000+ TPS in practice
– Ethereum: ~30 TPS on L1 (relies on L2s for scale)
Finality:
– Solana: ~0.15s
– Ethereum: ~12.8m
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Ethereum prioritizes decentralization and safety.
It tolerates 33% adversarial stake and has ~1M validators. Finality halts with >⅓ offline.
Solana tolerates 20% malicious + 20% offline stake. ~2K validators. centralized, but optimized for speed and fault tolerance under real-world conditions
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Ethereum’s design now treats L1 increasingly as a data availability and finality layer. (Further evident with RISC-V proposal)
Execution is expected to happen on rollups (L2s), which inherit Ethereum’s security but offer faster, cheaper txs.
Solana handles execution and consensus directly on L1.
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This divergence is strategic:
Ethereum leans into a modular architecture:
– L1: Finality + DA
– L2s: Execution + UX
Solana remains monolithic: consensus, execution, and settlement occur on the same layer. Only now with millisecond latency.
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On developer UX:
– Solana finality allows real-time confirmation of transactions
– No confirmation polling or block depth logic
– Vote txs removed. Cleaner app code
– Execution + finality = one step
Ethereum devs must account for reorg risk, L1→L2 bridging, and eventual confirmation
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On user experience:
– Solana UX is fast and cheap (sub-second txs, <$0.001)
– Ethereum L1 is secure but slow and expensive
– L2s improve Ethereum UX, but add cognitive and technical overhead (bridges, network switching)
Solana delivers the experience directly on L1.
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With Alpenglow consensus complexity is also reduced:
– PoH eliminated
– Voting off-chain via BLS certs
– No vote spam
– Leader failures skipped automatically
This improves validator efficiency and lowers hardware cost ceilings, though performance requirements remain high.
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Security tradeoffs:
– Solana: <20% adversarial stake tolerated
– Ethereum: <33%
Solana trades worst-case Byzantine safety for best-case performance and faster recovery.
Ethereum prioritizes predictability and robustness under attack.
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Implications for applications:
Solana now enables real-time on-chain apps:
– Order book DEXs
– High-frequency trading
– On-chain games
– Social protocols
– Payments & remittances
– Real-time DeFi automation
No need for L2s to achieve usable latency.
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Bottom line:
Ethereum is a secure, decentralized base layer for a modular rollup stack.
Solana is a high-performance monolithic chain optimized for real-time use.
Alpenglow doesn’t try to replicate Ethereum, it offers fundamentally different blockspace.
Choose accordingly.
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