Key Notes
- Solana’s validators have commenced the voting exercise to support or disapprove of the SIMD-0326.
- This may be the upgrade that finally revolutionizes Solana in terms of performance.
- Solana recently achieved more than 100,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS).
Solana’s SOL $182.1 24h volatility: 6.0% Market cap: $98.25 B Vol. 24h: $6.27 B validator community has commenced the voting exercise to support or disapprove of the SIMD-0326, also known as the Alpenglow proposal.
Should they vote in favor of the proposal, the Solana ecosystem may be on its way to finding more use cases and ultimately, expanding its reach.
Features of the alpenglow proposal
Alpenglow proposal is an upgrade designed to replace the current TowerBFT consensus mechanism with a faster, simpler, and more resilient system.
Specifically, it would move block finality from 12.8 seconds to as low as 100–150 milliseconds. This revolution can position Solana at a close range with Web2 infrastructure, particularly in terms of performance.
For perspective, the Alpenglow proposal was developed by a Solana-focused research team called Anza.
It comes with certain top-tier features like direct voting, signature aggregation, as well as a Validator Admission Ticket fee. The goal is to streamline participation and cut bandwidth costs.
Rather than trading votes on-chain, validators will achieve the same transaction off-chain, while cryptographic proof attests to consensus.
In addition to this proposal is the introduction of a fixed 1.6 SOL VAT per epoch. It is incinerated to offset inflation, but it still maintains economic barriers to participation. With this fee structure, there is no need for direct vote transaction costs.
Supporters believe that it significantly cuts down validator expenses by around 20%. On the other hand are critics, who opine that the fee is likely to raise entry barriers for smaller operators.
At the same time, Solana recently achieved more than 100,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS).
Although it was a brief move, Mert Mumtaz, the co-founder of the Solana developer tooling firm Helius, noted that developers could still “deduce that you can also theoretically do about 80-100k tps in transfers, oracle updates, and similar [operations].”
when we said 1,000,000 TPS — you didn't think we were kidding did you?
you are not gonna out engineer solana
first major blockchain with a recorded 100K TPS ***on mainnet***
I'll also get out infront of the typical reply guys
"but muurt, these are noop program calls, they're… https://t.co/pibGtbkhJP
— mert | helius.dev (@0xMert_) August 17, 2025
Meanwhile, SOL price has dropped to $180.70 after spiking to over $201 less than a week ago. It is worth noting that this outlook was triggered by the broader crypto market downtrend. Other top coins like Bitcoin BTC $115 367 24h volatility: 2.5% Market cap: $2.30 T Vol. 24h: $41.92 B and Ethereum ETH $4 315 24h volatility: 5.2% Market cap: $520.84 B Vol. 24h: $41.62 B are also losing steam at this time.
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