Solana Labs offshoot Anza pitches ‘biggest change’ ever to network consensus

Anza, a Solana blockchain infrastructure firm spun out of Solana Labs, has proposed a new proof-of-stake consensus called Alpenglow that it claims would be the biggest change to Solanas core protocol and compete with current internet infrastructure.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 Solanas core protocol since, well, ever, Anzas Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski and Roger Wattenhofer said on May 19.Alpenglow consists of Votor, which processes voting transactions and block finalization logic, and Rotor, a data dissemination protocol that would replace Solanas proof-of-history timestamping system and aim to reduce the time it takes for all nodes to agree on the network state.Source: AnzaAnza researchers claimed that Alpenglow will shatter both these latency bounds and the project expects it to reach actual finality in about 150 milliseconds, rivaling internet infrastructure.A median latency of 150 [milliseconds] does not just mean that Solana is fast it means Solana can compete with Web2 infrastructure in terms of responsiveness, potentially making blockchain technology viable for entirely new categories of applications that demand real-time performance.Votor which would replace TowerBFT would aim to finalize blocks in a single round if 80% of the stake is participating, and in two rounds if only 60% of the stake is responsive.Related: DeFi lender Aave reaches $40B in value locked onchainThese two voting modes are integrated and run concurrently, with finalization taking place as soon as the faster of the two paths terminates.Anzas researchers claimed this model would result in unprecedented finalization latency while enabling it to operate more effectively under harsh network conditions.Alpenglow wont fix Solanas network outagesThe projects white paper noted that switching to Alpenglow wouldnt completely shield Solana from the network outages that it has experienced in the past.Solana currently only has one production-ready client, Agave, meaning any security vulnerability in Agave can disrupt the entire Solana network.However, a new independent validator client called Firedancer is set to launch on Solanas mainnet sometime this year, which will provide client diversification for the network.Magazine: Father-son team lists Africas XRP Healthcare on Canadian stock exchange