Solana activated Alpenglow, replacing the TowerBFT consensus mechanism with Votor, an off-chain voting system based on cryptographic certificates. Removing vote transactions, which accounted for about 62% of traffic, sharply reduced the displayed throughput without indicating a decline in user activity: actual traffic reached roughly 2,150 transactions per second, compared with 1,990 the previous day. Validators must now pay 0.8 SOL per epoch instead of spending around 1.1 SOL per day on voting fees, substantially lowering the capital required to remain profitable but changing the network’s economic model. The target finality is 100 to 150 milliseconds, with one isolated measurement of 202 milliseconds, while the main network still faces concerns about observability, client compatibility and Byzantine resilience.
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