Solana Balidators have approved an update aimed at resolving transactions in just 150 milliseconds.
Solana Balidators last week approved a consensus upgrade for the network that dramatically reduces transactional finality. However, some experts are concerned that faster finality, including security, will result in trade-offs.
Over 98% of nodes favored the new Alpenglow upgrade. According to a September 2 post from Solana Solana, Solana’s latest consensus protocol, developed by Anza, a spinoff from Solana Labs, reduces the current 12-second wait.
For Solana, Alpenglow marks one of the boldest technical moves since the network’s halt in 2022 and 2023.
If it works as intended, the upgrade will replace older systems such as voting for history proofs and gossip messaging. Most of the consensus is a more lean design than running in a chain. Instead of pushing votes directly into the chain, each validator bundles them into a compact certificate.
Muriel Médard, award-winning software science and engineering Muriel Médard, and co-founder of Blockchain Infra Company Optimum, told Defiant that he hopes to reduce and speed faster, compatible with Web2, which is at the heart of Alpenglow.
“This is an important goal, and in itself I praise the majority of the Web3 community. It’s not that many of these are reasonable requests, but whether the technology can actually achieve that,” Medard said.
Security compromise
Alpenglow doesn’t have a fixed timeline yet. This is because you need to go through a test to verify your security. If everything is on track, Solana RPC company Helius expects the upgrade to reach the mainnet by early 2026.
Other networks, including Coinbase’s Base, Unicane and BNB chains, are also driving faster finality. For example, in mid-July, Base deployed Flashblocks. This is a new feature that reduces block times from 2 seconds to 200 milliseconds.
And while faster finality promises a more efficient market and a smoother user experience, it also raises questions about trade-offs. In May, Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzick told rebels that it would be impossible to achieve such a speed without a security compromise.
When asked about blockchain security, he said at the time that “more speeds cannot literally pass through the ocean to another continent, and cannot return again within a certain number of milliseconds.
Medard, one of the key inventors of random linear network coding, also highlighted the limitations of Alpenglow execution related to propagation, and was handled by an Alpenglow component called a rotor. In the case of blockchain, propagation refers to the transmission and distribution of new data (also known as blocks) across the network.
“Let’s focus on the aspects of the alpenro that the protocols generally do not control. This is propagation embodied by the rotors of the alpenro. In this part of the alpenro implementation, we cannot control the uncertainty of the connections that occur through Web2.
Additional data can slow down the network
The rotor uses a coding method that sends additional data to cover any piece that arrives late, Medard explained. She added that the approach taken by Alpenglow’s rotors is to use “1950s-60s codes” called Reed-Solomon. He added that it was originally designed for a different purpose, with only a few calculations and currently placing all sorts of constraints unrelated.”
“Instantiation of the use of RS rotors is rate ½ code. That is, half of the bandwidth is sacrificed to send pieces there to compensate for works that were supposed to arrive on time but not,” Medard said.
Professor MIT further added that the rotor will send additional data to cover the delay. This focuses on wasting resources when the network is clear and slowing things down when the network is busy.
She added: “You need to carefully adjust the redundancy/repairs, but rarely, the rate ½ is the correct redundancy for a single validator. All validation devices have the correct rate and the routes to each destination can be essentially the same.
The rebels reached out to Alpenglow developer Anza to comment on both Médard and Garzik’s concerns about consensus protocols, but received no response by reporting time.
The Solana ecosystem has continued to grow in recent months, with total values locked in a network led by USDC issuer Circle and loan protocol Kamino (TVL).