Solana Labs spinout Anza proposes Alpenglow, 'the biggest change to Solana’s core protocol'

Anza, the developer studio spun out of Solana Labs, has unveiled what it calls “the biggest change to Solana’s core protocol” ever. According to an announcement , the high-throughput Layer 1 is getting a completely redesigned undercarriage called Alpenglow. 

“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 wrote in a white paper published on Monday.

The upgrade replaces Solana’s existing TowerBFT proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and proof-of-history timestamping system with new components called Votor and Rotor.

Votor — short for “Voting Component” — will handle consensus logic and replace TowerBFT. Rather than relying on the current node “gossip” model, it will run a “faster direct communication primitive” to vote on block finalization. Nodes vote to either notarize a block or skip it if it arrives late or is deemed untrustworthy. A block can be notarized in one round if 80% of stake approve it, or in two rounds if 60% approve, using parallel voting tracks for faster and more scalable processing. Anza claims this could bring block processing times down to 100–150 milliseconds.

"I got nearly everything wrong about consensus, except the important parts: it can’t be in the way of block producers utilizing 100% of the bandwidth 100% of the time. users need some deterministic finality in one round (2-delta)," Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko wrote on X. "Alpenglow nails both of these requirements with a simple and elegant design that’s really easy to intuit."

Rotor, the second component, refines Solana’s existing block propagation protocol. It builds on Turbine — the current system that shreds blocks into smaller pieces and distributes them across the network — by using a single layer of relay nodes and optimizing bandwidth usage based on stake. Like Turbine, Rotor uses "erasure-coding" to ensure the block can be reconstructed from a subset of these shreds.

Anza is also the team maintaining Solana’s Agave client, the network's original validator software.