TECH NEWS

Solana's Alpenglow Upgrade Replaces TowerBFT With Votor

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I've been tracking Solana's Alpenglow upgrade since it entered community testing, and it's one of the more unusual moves I've seen in consensus design: a live network swapping out its entire finality mechanism while it keeps settling billions of dollars in value. Alpenglow tears out both TowerBFT and Proof of History, the two systems that have defined Solana's consensus since its 2020 launch, and replaces them with a new voting engine called Votor. The result is finality dropping from 12.8 seconds to roughly 100-150 milliseconds, and a Byzantine fault tolerance threshold that tightens from 33% to 20% adversarial stake. Below, I walk through what Votor actually changes, why the tighter safety margin is defensible rather than reckless, and what validator operators and application teams need to do before it activates.

Why TowerBFT Couldn't Close the Gap

Solana's pitch has always been raw throughput: 400-millisecond slots, sub-cent fees, and more transactions...

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'You can suddenly float to the 30,000-foot level and understand how it’s all supposed to work together' — Original Mass Effect composer looks back on the 'rewarding' collaborative experience while working on the RPG

* Original Mass Effect composer Jack Wall says working on the game was a "rewarding" collaborative experience * Wall says he learned the "value" and "importance" of collaborating with other composers * He adds that working with other people can help "fulfill the mandate of having