- Off-chain aggregated signatures cut bandwidth and fees; validators earn per-slot rewards, missed votes lose rewards, leaders receive compensation.
- Validator Admission Ticket burns 1.6 SOL each epoch; slices-and-shreds distribution persists, with recovery requests reconstructing missing block data.
Solana validators opened a vote on proposal SIMD-0326, known as “Alpenglow,” at epoch 840 on August 27. The ballot will run through epoch 842, roughly one week, and requires validators to signal support or rejection. About 6.5% of staked SOL has voted so far, with results leaning toward approval, while most stake has yet to participate.
Alpenglow proposes a full replacement of Solana’s current consensus combination—Proof-of-History for ordering and TowerBFT for agreement. The stated goal is to cut block finality from roughly 12.8 seconds to 100–150 milliseconds. Finality is the point at which a confirmed transaction cannot be reversed by a chain reorganization.
At the core of the design is Votor, a direct-voting protocol. Validators would finalize blocks in one or two rounds, depending on network conditions. Certificates—attest, skip, and finalize—record outcomes, and cryptographic aggregates compress validator votes to reduce message overhead. Consequently, bandwidth use falls alongside the time to confirm transactions.
The proposal retains Solana’s leader schedule and slot structure. In each slot, a preselected leader assembles a block, splitting payloads into large “slices” and smaller “shreds” for distribution. Validators then verify and vote. If a supermajority is not reached in the first round, a second round decides the block’s status. Moreover, a data-recovery path lets nodes request missing shreds to reconstruct blocks when needed.
Alpenglow also outlines a new rewards model. Today, validators submit on-chain vote transactions every slot, which raises network and fee costs. Under the proposal, voting would move off-chain with aggregated signatures.
Each validator would earn rewards proportional to stake for every valid vote per slot; missed votes would forfeit rewards and could trigger removal from the active set. Additionally, a Validator Admission Ticket of 1.6 SOL per epoch would be burned to deter spam and set a cost of participation. Leaders would receive extra compensation for aggregating and relaying votes.
If adopted, SIMD-0326 would reframe Solana’s performance profile around faster finality, lower messaging overhead, and clearer economic incentives, while keeping the leader-driven slot production model intact.
Solana (SOL) is trading at $204.40 USD, with a 4.5% daily increase and a 9% rise over the last 7 days. Its market capitalization is $110.04 billion, supported by a 24-hour trading volume of $12.75 billion.
SOL maintains the #6 position globally, with a circulating supply of 540.6 million tokens out of a total supply of 608.4 million.
Despite being 30.7% below its all-time high of $293.31, Solana has delivered over 40,000% growth since its historical low of $0.50 USD.
