Solana's validator community finally approved the activation of SIMD-0326: Alpenglow, which is expected to be the most profound rewrite of the protocol's design. Once activated, Alpenglow is set to reduce transaction finality to sub-150ms.
Alpenglow, biggest upgrade in Solana's history, secures validator approval
The activation of Alpenglow, a radical upgrade of Solana (SOL) blockchain protocol architecture, is now approved by the community of SOL validators. With 52% of validators participating, the SMID-0326 Alpenglow proposal is now backed by 98.27% of SOL stakers.
A total of 1.05% of the SOL community opposed the Alpenglow activation, while 0.36% of the voting power abstained. As such, Alpenglow is expected to debut on Solana's mainnet in 2026.
Alpenglow is set to retire both crucial components of Solana's (SOL) architecture, proof of history (PoH) and TowerBFT. As a result, Solana (SOL) will validate transactions in an entirely new manner, more speedily and resource-effectively.
Proposed by Solana's R&D team Anza Research, Alpenglow introduces two major components of the new design, Votor and Rotor. Votor, a consensus protocol, simplifies Solana's validator voting logic, making the process of block validation optimized.
Rotor, a novel data propagation layer, reduces delays and aligns bandwidth usage with stake distribution.
As a result, Solana's block validation time will drop from 12.8s to 150ms, and, with ideal network conditions, to sub-100ms values.
Solana versus Ethereum: What to expect in 2026
Besides that, Solana (SOL) will become more attack-resistant than ever before. Solana (SOL) will be able to validate blocks even with 25% of staked SOL controlled by an attacker and 20% of validators being offline.
In an introduction blog post, Solana Foundation indicated that Alpenglow going live is set to change the narrative for all participants of the Web3 economy:
Combined with Firedancer's throughput gains, the practical implications are transformative. For traders: Sub-second execution with cryptographic finality for price-sensitive strategies. For applications: Responsive interfaces that feel native, not blockchain-constrained. For users: Instant feedback with mathematical certainty, not probabilistic confidence
While the exact timeline for Alpenglow's activation isn't there yet, it is likely to go live in H1, 2026. Ethereum (ETH), a key Solana (SOL) rival, is expected to ship the Gloas-Amsterdam (Glamsterdam) upgrade in the same period.
Glamsterdam is poised to reduce Ethereum's (ETH) block time by 50%, to six seconds.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team