Solana Labs offshoot Anza pitches ‘biggest change’ ever to network consensus

Anza, a Solana blockchain infrastructure firm spun out of Solana Labs, has proposed a new proof-of-stake consensus called Alpenglow that it claims would be “the biggest change to Solana’s core protocol” and compete with current internet infrastructure.

“We believe that the release of Alpenglow will be a turning point for Solana. Alpenglow is not only a new consensus protocol, but the biggest change to Solana’s core protocol since, well, ever,” Anza’s Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski and Roger Wattenhofer said on May 19.

Alpenglow consists of Votor, which processes voting transactions and block finalization logic, and Rotor, a data dissemination protocol that would replace Solana’s proof-of-history timestamping system and aim to reduce the time it takes for all nodes to agree on the network state.

Anza researchers claimed that “Alpenglow will shatter both these latency bounds” and the project expects it to reach actual finality in about 150 milliseconds, rivaling internet infrastructure.

Votor — which would replace TowerBFT — would aim to finalize blocks in a single round if 80% of the stake is participating, and in two rounds if only 60% of the stake is responsive.

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These two voting modes are integrated and run concurrently, with finalization taking place as soon as the faster of the two paths terminates.

Anza’s researchers claimed this model would result in “unprecedented finalization latency” while enabling it to operate more effectively under “harsh network conditions.”

The project’s white paper noted that switching to Alpenglow wouldn’t completely shield Solana from the network outages that it has experienced in the past.

Solana currently only has one production-ready client, Agave, meaning any security vulnerability in Agave can disrupt the entire Solana network.

However, a new independent validator client called Firedancer is set to launch on Solana’s mainnet sometime this year, which will provide client diversification for the network.

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