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Last week we dig deep into SIMD-326 (Alpenglow). This proposes a new consensus protocol for Solana. The impact of Alpenglow's heading is a 100-fold reduction in Solana's final time, ranging from ~12.8 seconds to about 150ms.
A valid signature vote for SIMD-326 took place between Epoch 840 (starting August 27) and 842 (end of today), with preliminary stake participation rates of 51% at the time of writing.
SIMD-326 passes, with approximately 99% of the unextracted votes in an advantageous position. With Alpenglow's voting period approaching the end, it's a good time to review how Solana Governance works.
Solana's on-chain governance is intended to show community sentiment rather than automatic enforcement of changes. In other words, social consensus is the ultimate arbiter, with actual decision points resting on validators and developers who must collectively agree to the deployment and execution of new software. The key stakeholder in this process is the ANZA team. This requires designing and deploying changes to the Agobe client through the Functional Gate.
