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The 60% and 80% figures in Alpenglow are stake thresholds for consensus certificates. They are not transaction fees, and they are not measured network speed. The 250 ms and 800 ms values are design timing parameters from an independent technical explainer, not Solana Foundation measurements or finality promises. Solana Foundation’s upgrade page separately gives roughly 150 ms as its finality target or expectation. Each number answers a different question, and this article separates them.
What the 60% and 80% thresholds control
Both percentages are shares of total stake that must cast a particular vote before a certificate exists. The SIMD-0326 proposal, Solana Foundation’s formal specification for Alpenglow, sets the notarization and finalization certificates at 60% of stake. Fast finalization requires 80% of stake to send notarization votes in the first round. (SIMD-0326 proposal)
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The proposal defines a certificate as “a proof that a certain fraction of nodes (by stake) cast a specific type of vote.” A certificate records protocol state. It does not describe how long that state took to reach the network, and it does not describe what a user pays.
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In round one, each validator votes to notarize a specific block if a valid block arrived before its local timeout, or votes to skip the slot if it did not. In round two, validators vote to finalize once they have seen enough notarization votes. If the conditions for finalization are not met, safe-to-notarize and safe-to-skip conditions govern fallback votes. The proposal says votes are sent directly between validators.
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The 80% path: fast finalization
If 80% of stake notarizes a block in the first round, the block can finalize through a fast-finalization certificate. That is the shorter route. The proposal allows a slot to finalize either this way or through a slow-finalization certificate combined with a notarization certificate. The 80% threshold is a protocol rule, not a guarantee that every block takes the fast path. Whether a block does depends on how votes arrive.
| Route | Stake threshold | Voting rounds | What completes finality |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fast finalization | 80% notarization votes in round one | First round | Fast-finalization certificate |
| Slow finalization | 60% for notarization and for slow-finalization certificates | Two rounds | Slow-finalization certificate plus notarization certificate |
The proposal also says a finalized block decides earlier undecided slots indirectly. Ancestors of the finalized block are finalized, and skipped slots in the chain are marked as skipped. The proposal attributes its safety and liveness proofs to a companion white paper, so the claims in the proposal itself should be read as design statements, with the proofs living elsewhere.
The 250 ms and 800 ms timing values
The 250 ms and 800 ms figures come from an xroot.dev explainer published on September 12, 2026, “Alpenglow Finality in Numbers: 60%, 80%, 250 ms, 800 ms”. The author treats them as timing parameters in the protocol design, not as observed performance.
250 ms: the assumed message-crossing time
The explainer describes 250 ms as the assumed time for a message to cross the network under normal operation. In the protocol’s notation this is DELTA. It is a planning assumption. It is not a published measurement, and it is not a bound that holds on every network under every condition.
800 ms: the silent-leader skip timer
The 800 ms value is the timer after which validators stop waiting for a leader that has not produced a block and move on by skipping the slot. It is a failure-handling timeout. It sets how long the network waits in a fault case. It is not how long a normal transaction takes to finalize, and it should not be added to the 250 ms value to get a latency figure.
Where the roughly 150 ms finality target fits
Solana Foundation’s upgrade page, Alpenglow (updated September 2026), gives roughly 150 ms as the time it expects a transaction to take to become final. It is a target or expectation, not a constant. The page states the distinction plainly: “The 150ms is how long a transaction takes to become final, not how often blocks are produced.” Finality latency and slot time are separate quantities.
For comparison, the same page gives 12.8 seconds as the finality time under TowerBFT, Solana’s current consensus. That is the baseline the Foundation uses. Readers should not assume every observed confirmation takes exactly 12.8 seconds, because actual timings vary with network conditions.
How to compare these figures correctly
- Threshold figures (60%, 80%) are protocol rules for stake. They tell you how many validators must agree, not how quickly they agree.
- Timing assumptions (250 ms) describe the network model the design assumes.
- Timeouts (800 ms) govern recovery when a leader fails. They are not finality promises.
- Targets (~150 ms) are the Foundation’s expectation for finality on a live network.
- Baselines (12.8 seconds) are the Foundation’s comparison figure for the current TowerBFT path.
Mixing these categories produces wrong conclusions. For example, dividing 800 ms by 250 ms does not yield a latency result, and comparing 800 ms directly with the 150 ms target compares a timeout with an expectation.
Votor, Rotor, and rollout status
Solana Foundation describes Alpenglow as replacing the consensus layer while leaving execution unchanged. The SVM, transactions, programs, and fees stay the same. Votor is the voting protocol that implements the certificate logic described above. Rotor is a block-data dissemination component planned for a later stage.
The Foundation’s September 2026 page says Votor ships in Agave 4.3 and gives no schedule for Rotor. Activation on a particular cluster depends on the software a validator runs and on that cluster’s own activation steps, so the release notes and the upgrade page are the places to confirm status before relying on any behavior in production. Live performance also varies by cluster.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Resilience and migration tradeoffs
The SIMD-0326 proposal describes a resilience model that tolerates 20% of stake being malicious and 20% being offline while still reaching consensus. The proposal presents this as a design property. It does not guarantee that implementation or deployment is free of risk.
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Reading the numbers you encounter
- Identify which category the number belongs to: threshold, assumption, timeout, target, or baseline.
- Check whether it is a protocol specification, an independent explanation, or a Solana Foundation statement, and note the date.
- If a claim is about speed, ask whether it is a design target or a measured observation on a named cluster.
- If a claim is about rollout, check the current Solana Foundation upgrade page and the Agave release notes for the version you run.
Applying these four checks removes most of the confusion that surrounds the headline figures.
Sources: SIMD-0326: Proposal for the New Alpenglow Consensus Protocol, Solana Foundation; Alpenglow, Solana Foundation, updated September 2026; Alpenglow Finality in Numbers, xroot.dev, September 12, 2026.
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