Solana validators have begun voting on SIMD-0326, the “Alpenglow” upgrade that would replace the network’s existing Proof-of-History and TowerBFT systems with a new consensus architecture aimed at settling blocks in 150 milliseconds, down from the current 12.8-second average. The ballot opened in Epoch 840 on 27–28 August and will run through Epoch 842, giving node operators roughly one week to decide. To be adopted, the measure needs participation from at least one-third of staked tokens and a two-thirds majority in favour. Early data show turnout at 9.87 percent, with more than 99 percent of votes supporting the proposal. Prominent stakeholders—including infrastructure providers Helius, Drift and Laine—have endorsed the change, while Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has urged validators to cast ballots. Alpenglow introduces a direct-vote mechanism called Votor that aggregates off-chain validator messages, a design expected to cut latency and bandwidth consumption and to strengthen incentives against equivocation. Developers say near-instant finality would make Solana more attractive for high-frequency decentralised finance, gaming and institutional use cases. Separately, competition among independent validator clients intensified after Anza’s Agave software matched Jump Crypto’s Firedancer by hitting 1.1 million transactions per second in a single-node synthetic test. The parallel push on both consensus and client performance underscores Solana’s bid to position itself as the highest-throughput layer-1 blockchain. Investor interest has tracked the technical momentum: SOL has delivered the strongest weekly gain among the 10 largest crypto assets, outpacing the broader market as the upgrade vote gets under way.