Solana developers have opened the community governance process for SIMD 326, nicknamed “Alpenglow,” a proposed overhaul of the network’s consensus algorithm. The upgrade, shepherded by core-development group Anza, is billed as the most significant change to Solana’s architecture since the chain went live in 2020. Alpenglow combines a new consensus design with Rotor, an optimized block-propagation protocol, and is intended to cut transaction-confirmation times to about 150 milliseconds—roughly an 80- to 100-fold reduction in latency compared with the current network. Researchers affiliated with ETH Zurich contributed to the mechanism’s design, according to supporting documentation. If approved by token holders, Alpenglow would be rolled out in stages through Solana Improvement Proposal SIMD 326. The community vote will determine whether the upgrade is merged into the mainnet release schedule.