Solana’s ‘Alpenglow’ Upgrade Proposal Passes in Bid to Boost Network Speed

The Solana community has endorsed one of the largest governance initiatives to enhance the speed and efficiency of the network. That project was dubbed the Alpenglow protocol and was overwhelmingly voted by validators.

Solana Endorses Upgrade to Increase its Speed and Reliability

By the vote count, the bill referred to as SIMD-0326 had 98.94% voter participation. The voting site showed that it was overwhelmingly voted for passage, scoring nearly three times the two-thirds mark needed to pass. Overall, over 206.9 trillion of the total tokens voted in support and just under 2.2 trillion opposed the move. Approximately 144 billion tokens did not vote, and almost half of the supply did not vote. When the Alpenglow upgrade entered community voting phase, Solana outperformed other altcoins. Hence, passage will likely influence its price more.

The outcome indicates that there is high support for technical upgrades, which aim to enhance the performance of Solana. Alpenglow is concerned with refining the consensus process, which is how the network authenticates transactions and creates blocks. Thus, there can be a reduction in delayed communication between validators. Also, it will enable transactions to be finalized faster because of the new system making the best use of resources available.

Proponents of the proposal believe that the Alpenglow will help the network attend to a larger pool of transactions as more people use the network. A more effective consensus system would lessen congestion during peak hours and would also make the network more appealing to developers.

The vote passed is also an indication of maturity in Solana governance. Similar to Ethereum, the network incorporates community voting in the form of token-based voting requests known as SIMD, or Solana Improvement Documents. The different proposals target various aspects of the blockchain, including the distribution of fees and technical enhancements. By launching Alpenglow, Solana adds to the list of blockchains that keeps developing its consensus rules to meet customer demand.

Solana Already Beats Others in Speed and Efficiency

The enthusiastic reception of Alpenglow is based on the fact that Solana is already among the most efficient blockchains. Based on DeFillama data, the network is already a leader in a variety of areas where speed and cost are crucial.

Solana has continued to push its throughput limits at up to 65,000 transactions per second with a block finality rate of less than two seconds. This makes others such as Ethereum at orders of magnitude slower. The average transaction costs are around $0.00025, which is over 10,000 times cheaper compared to Ethereum. This efficiency has also made Solana a preferred network for the launch of World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin.

Solana also has a higher capital efficiency. More than $562 million of quarterly DeFi revenue, outpacing Ethereum and BSC when normalized to value locked.