Solana's new Alpenglow upgrade is now live, bringing a significant change to how the network processes consensus votes and how its TPS figures should be interpreted.
Previously, validator votes were recorded as onchain transactions, accounting for approximately 62% of Solana's in the week before the upgrade.
Alpenglow replaces this mechanism with direct validator voting and aggregated cryptographic certificates, while targeting finality of around 150 milliseconds.
I just checked and on 22 October, Solscan recorded 174.6 million successful transactions, of which just 85 were classified as vote transactions. Non vote transaction activity has remained broadly consistent.
Solana's headline TPS has consequently fallen significantly, without a corresponding reduction in application transaction activity.
I welcome this change, it was definitely one of the things I personally didn't like about Solana, I believe it's the correct direction for transparency and speed. It also brings greater transparency to throughput metrics that have historically been heavily marketed, often without clearly distinguishing consensus voting from other transaction activity.
Previously, validator votes were recorded as onchain transactions, accounting for approximately 62% of Solana's in the week before the upgrade.
Alpenglow replaces this mechanism with direct validator voting and aggregated cryptographic certificates, while targeting finality of around 150 milliseconds.
I just checked and on 22 October, Solscan recorded 174.6 million successful transactions, of which just 85 were classified as vote transactions. Non vote transaction activity has remained broadly consistent.
Solana's headline TPS has consequently fallen significantly, without a corresponding reduction in application transaction activity.
I welcome this change, it was definitely one of the things I personally didn't like about Solana, I believe it's the correct direction for transparency and speed. It also brings greater transparency to throughput metrics that have historically been heavily marketed, often without clearly distinguishing consensus voting from other transaction activity.
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Cardano already supports zero knowledge proof verification directly on its main chain. (ZK proof)
Plutus V3 introduced native pairing operations with the Chang upgrade in September 2024. These give smart contracts the cryptographic tools to verify proofs from compatible systems such as Groth16.
The proof is generated outside the blockchain, then checked by a smart contract during transaction validation. The network can verify that a condition has been met while the private inputs behind that proof remain undisclosed.
This allows developers to build applications on Cardano where someone proves eligibility without publishing their full credentials. With suitable proof systems, complex calculations can also happen elsewhere, with Cardano checking a compact proof of the result.
Verification consumes resources, and the proof only establishes what its circuit actually checks, there's some really cool things possible on Cardano which in my opinion could unlock another door for further utility to ecosystem users.
Plutus V3 introduced native pairing operations with the Chang upgrade in September 2024. These give smart contracts the cryptographic tools to verify proofs from compatible systems such as Groth16.
The proof is generated outside the blockchain, then checked by a smart contract during transaction validation. The network can verify that a condition has been met while the private inputs behind that proof remain undisclosed.
This allows developers to build applications on Cardano where someone proves eligibility without publishing their full credentials. With suitable proof systems, complex calculations can also happen elsewhere, with Cardano checking a compact proof of the result.
Verification consumes resources, and the proof only establishes what its circuit actually checks, there's some really cool things possible on Cardano which in my opinion could unlock another door for further utility to ecosystem users.
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Building on Cardano?
Definitely check out @DemeterRun I've been using their services for years, and the team are extremely reputable and knowledgeable.
No paid promotion, just a post to appreciate teams providing a great consistent service, removing technical complexity when building on Cardano.
Definitely check out @DemeterRun I've been using their services for years, and the team are extremely reputable and knowledgeable.
No paid promotion, just a post to appreciate teams providing a great consistent service, removing technical complexity when building on Cardano.
Every Cardano API. Your choice.
→ Blockfrost, Kupo, Ogmios, UTxO RPC
→ Pay per request, $0 when idle
→ 99.9% SLA, measured publicly
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43 blocks last epoch for DAVE stake pool delegators.
We have now achieved 40.71 million ADA of live stake.
4,350 total Cardano blocks.
1392 current delegators.
Together, we continue to contribute towards Cardano, and at the same time delegators continue to receive extremely impressive rewards.
I am ready and have had the infrastructure waiting for almost a year now to expand operations, and bring our impressive reliability, performance and delegators additional reward opportunuties by contributing towards Midnight validation.
Thanks for supporting DAVE stake pool. 💙
We have now achieved 40.71 million ADA of live stake.
4,350 total Cardano blocks.
1392 current delegators.
Together, we continue to contribute towards Cardano, and at the same time delegators continue to receive extremely impressive rewards.
I am ready and have had the infrastructure waiting for almost a year now to expand operations, and bring our impressive reliability, performance and delegators additional reward opportunuties by contributing towards Midnight validation.
Thanks for supporting DAVE stake pool. 💙
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Very appreciative of everybody that took a chance on this stake pool, and helped bootstrap it up to where we are today. Really means a lot.
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HOSKY - Is now responsible for over 8.3 million transactions on Cardano and rising.
6.60% of the current total Cardano transactions @hoskytoken
6.60% of the current total Cardano transactions @hoskytoken
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Cardano took longer to build and had a broader set of problems to solve, while building on and extending Bitcoin’s principles. Those foundations still underpin how it operates today. Turns out, Bitcoin had already taken a different path from balance based models built around shared mutable accounts.
eUTXO + UTXO
eUTXO + UTXO
Cardano built programmability around that same constraint. Its eUTXO model adds data and programmable spending conditions while preserving a simple rule, that an output is immutable and can only be spent once.
Validators evaluate the transaction’s explicit context, allowing script behaviour and fees to be checked before broadcast. Applications still have to manage contention when transactions need the same output, and successful validation does not guarantee inclusion. The dependencies are completely explicit.
Ethereum's account model supports flexible interactions through shared state. The trade off is that earlier transactions can change the state yours encounters. Simulation helps, although it cannot freeze that state between submission and execution.
Ethereum’s native UTXO proposal revisits the spend once principle for payments, specifically to reduce persistent state. Its scope is narrower than Cardano’s programmable ledger, but the value of that underlying constraint is very familiar.
As a developer, I really value being able to reason about execution and cost before asking a user to commit.
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