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Last week, we delved into the details of SIMD-326 (Alpenglow), a new consensus protocol proposed for Solana. The standout feature of Alpenglow is a significant reduction in Solana’s finality time, from approximately 12.8 seconds to just 150ms.
A vote by validators on SIMD-326 took place between epochs 840 (starting on Aug. 27) and 842 (ending today), with an initial stake participation rate of 51% at the time of writing.
The approval for SIMD-326 is expected to be high, with around 99% of non-abstaining votes in support. As the voting period for Alpenglow draws to a close, it’s a good opportunity to revisit how Solana governance functions.
Solana’s on-chain governance serves as a signal of community sentiment rather than an automatic enforcement mechanism for changes. Ultimately, social consensus plays a crucial role, with validators and developers needing to reach a collective agreement to deploy and operate the new software. The Anza team holds significant influence in this process, responsible for implementing changes in the Agave client through feature gates.
