Ethereum and Solana: A New Chapter in Public Chain Competition

Ethereum is undergoing supply-side reform. After the dream of the "infinite garden" was shattered, Vitalik began to constrain the development of L2/Rollup and more actively defend the L1 track. The "speeding up and reducing costs" plan for the Ethereum mainnet has been put on the agenda, and the shift to Risc-V is just the beginning. In the future, the focus will be on how to catch up with or even surpass other public chains in terms of efficiency.

At the same time, Solana continues to expand its consumption demand scenarios. Solana adheres to the philosophy of "expand or die" and resolutely follows the path of strengthening its L1. In addition to the deployment process of Firedancer developed by a well-known trading company, at the recent Solana conference in New York, the Alpenglow consensus protocol from the Anza team won first place, attracting everyone's attention.

Interestingly, both Ethereum and Alpenglow share the ultimate dream of becoming the "world computer."

New Consensus Mechanism in the Era of Large-Scale Nodes

Since the inception of Bitcoin, the number of nodes and their degree of decentralization have been regarded as important indicators for measuring the decentralization of a blockchain network. To avoid centralization, the security threshold is typically set at 33%, meaning that no single entity should exceed this proportion.

However, driven by capital efficiency, Bitcoin mining ultimately transitioned to mining pool clusters, while Ethereum became the main stage for certain large staking service providers and centralized exchanges. Nevertheless, this does not mean that these entities can completely control the operation of the network. Under the model of "maintaining the network to earn incentives/management fees," they usually do not have malicious motives.

However, assessing the health of a network must take its scale into account. For example, in a small group of only three people, a 2/3 majority is needed to be considered effectively operating. Pursuing merely the lowest safety threshold of 1/3 is meaningless, as the remaining two can easily collude, with the cost of wrongdoing being very low while the potential gains could be substantial.

In contrast, if it is a large-scale network with 10,000 nodes, there is no need to pursue a 2/3 majority vote. Under the existing incentive model, most nodes do not know each other, and the coordination costs for collusion between large staking service providers and exchanges would also become excessively high.

So, if we appropriately reduce the number of nodes and the consensus ratio, can we achieve "speeding up and reducing costs"?

This is exactly the idea of Alpenglow. It plans to maintain a scale of about 1500 nodes while reducing the security consensus to 20%. This not only improves the node confirmation speed and allows nodes to earn more mainnet incentives, but also encourages the expansion of node scale, such as growing to around 10,000.

It is still difficult to determine whether this approach will produce an effect of 1+1>2 or break through existing security mechanisms. However, this bold attempt seems to align well with the consistent innovative spirit of certain public chains, adding a new dimension to the competition among public chains.

Alpenglow: Redefining the Blockchain Broadcasting Mechanism

The theoretical basis of Alpenglow is that in the era of large-scale nodes, a strong consensus is not required. This is because under the PoS mechanism, potential attackers need to mobilize huge capital to control the network. Even at a scale of 20%, based on current prices, Ethereum would require 20 billion USD, while certain public chains would need 10 billion USD. With such a vast amount of funds, choosing to attack the blockchain network is clearly not a wise decision, especially since they would also face a counterattack from the remaining 80% of nodes.

In practice, Alpenglow roughly divides the entire process into three parts: Rotor, Votor, and Repair. This can be seen as a deep transformation of the Turbine mechanism to some extent.

Turbine is a block broadcasting mechanism of a certain public chain, aimed at disseminating block information to achieve consensus confirmation among all nodes. Unlike the Gossip protocol used by early Ethereum, Turbine adopts an intermediate state that lies between complete decentralization and high centralization.

In Alpenglow, the variant of the protocol is called Rotor, which is essentially an ordered block message propagation method where no Leader or Relay node is fixed.

Votor is the node confirmation mechanism. In the concept of Alpenglow, if the first round of node voting reaches an 80% ratio (meeting the minimum threshold of over 20%), it can be directly and quickly passed. If the first round of voting is between 60% and 80%, a second round of voting can be initiated, and if it exceeds 60% again, it can be finally confirmed.

If the above steps still fail, the Repair mechanism will be initiated. However, if this situation occurs frequently, it may raise questions about the reliability of the protocol.

The innovation of Alpenglow lies in the fact that it does not simply increase bandwidth by adding hardware resources, but focuses on reducing the block consensus generation process. If it can keep data blocks small (for example, limited to around 1500 Bytes), and the generation time short enough (for instance, achieving 100ms in tests, only 1% of the current 10s), then the performance improvement will be quite significant.

Conclusion

As the development of existing L2 solutions approaches its limits, and certain L2 solutions fail to gain support from specific public chains, the demand for continued expansion of the mainnet has become increasingly urgent. Only by continuously improving the mainnet TPS can we maintain a competitive edge in the public chain competition.

It is worth noting that the application of Alpenglow is not limited to specific public chains. Theoretically, any blockchain that adopts the PoS mechanism, including Ethereum, can use this mechanism. This reflects that current blockchain research has reached the technical boundary and urgently needs more support from computer science and even sociological concepts.

In this fiercely competitive public chain ecosystem, innovation will continue to drive technological progress. Each public chain is seeking its own unique positioning and development path, and this diversified competitive landscape will ultimately propel the entire blockchain industry forward.