Solana Approves Alpenglow Upgrade Aiming for $250 SOL
By: Isha Das
Solana has marked a crucial milestone with the completion of the governance process for the much-anticipated Alpenglow upgrade. With an overwhelming community consensus of 98.27% in favor, the approval process concluded, positioning Solana for a transformative journey that could eventually enhance its market position and value to potentially reach $250.
The Alpenglow upgrade signifies a significant overhaul of Solana's consensus architecture, supplanting existing protocols such as Proof-of-History and TowerBFT with the more advanced Votor system. This new mechanism offers a direct-vote-based approach, reducing transaction finality to as low as 100-150 milliseconds, a drastic improvement from the nearly 13 seconds under TowerBFT. This change not only boosts the network’s speed but also its scalability by minimizing heavy gossip traffic, effectively slashing computational overhead and communication costs.
From a technical standpoint, the new protocol introduces a “20+20” resilience model, preserving network functionality even under adverse conditions. It divides operational times into slots with specific leaders, ensuring continuous system operation. According to Shawn Young of MEXC Research, these enhancements could position Solana not only as a faster blockchain but also as an attractive platform for developers and institutional investors, potentially propelling the price of SOL to $215 by September's end and $250 by the year's conclusion.
Besides technical refinements, the upgrade restructures Solana's economic framework by shifting voting off-chain. Validators will bypass vote transactions per slot, thus eliminating bandwidth burdens and transaction fees. Instead, they will utilize a Validator Admission Ticket at a cost of 1.6 SOL per epoch, maintaining economic barriers while ensuring network sustainability. Leaders are compensated through rewards proportional to vote aggregations, promoting efficiency. These comprehensive improvements promise to align Solana's performance with Web2 standards while ensuring robust blockchain security even as network adoption intensifies.
