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Alpenglow: Solana's Great Consensus Rewrite

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Thank you to Brady, Wen Xu, Kobi, Quentin Kniep, Roger Wattenhofer, and Anatoly Yakovenko for reviewing earlier drafts of this article. The Alpenglow consensus algorithm represents the most significant overhaul of Solana’s core protocol to date. Drawing on the latest advances in blockchain research, it fundamentally rearchitects how consensus is achieved across the network. Alpenglow is the work of Anza’s new research division, led by Professor Roger Wattenhofer of ETH Zurich, one of the world’s top-ranked computer science institutions. A leading authority in distributed systems, Professor Wattenhofer previously co-authored the 2024 paper Halting the Solana Blockchain with Epsilon Stake, which uncovered possible liveness vulnerabilities in Solana’s current consensus protocol. Professor Wattenhofer is joined at Anza by his former PhD students, Kobi Sliwinski and Quentin Kniep. The team’s task was to redesign Solana’s consensus algorithm to be more performant and provably correct, while

Blog / Research Alpenglow: Solana's Great Consensus Rewrite 0xIchigo Developer Experience Engineer 0xIchigo on X 0xIchigo on LinkedIn Lostin Researcher Lostin on X 34 min read May 26, 2025 Table of Contents Thank you to Brady , Wen Xu, Kobi , Quentin Kniep , Roger Wattenhofer , and Anatoly Yakovenko for reviewing earlier drafts of this article. Actionable Insights Alpenglow's headline benefit for Solana is a 100x reduction in time to transaction finality . Depending on a validator's geographic location, this will fall from 12.8 seconds to 100-150ms, allowing Solana to become competitive with m

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