Solana’s Yakovenko questions Alpenglow build as vote transactions exit

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has said Alpenglow could have shipped in half the time through a simpler vote-program change, ahead of the Oct. 21 consensus migration that will remove validator vote transactions from blocks. Summary Yakovenko said a simpler vote-program change could have halved Alpenglow’s development time. Removing validator vote transactions will lower headline TPS counts without necessarily changing user activity. A burned 0.8 SOL admission fee per epoch will replace individual voting fees. Some RPC nodes may receive finality updates later than Alpenglow’s 150-millisecond target. Yakovenko, in an Oct. 21 X post, made the remark while quoting a comment celebrating the planned removal of on-chain votes and mocking the recurring criticism that most Solana transactions per second consist of validator votes. “Alpenglow would have shipped in half the time if they just changed the vote program to the ag state machine” Anza’s published design describes a replacement for TowerBFT, the system validators have used to agree on blocks, with direct voting and compact certificates. The mainnet migration has been scheduled for Oct. 21, as crypto.news previously reported whi...