Solana’s TPS Fell With Alpenglow – Votes Left the Count

Solana switched its consensus system from TowerBFT to Alpenglow on October 21, and validator votes stopped being included in transaction counts. Under TowerBFT, validators’ votes were ordinary transactions; Alpenglow’s Votor protocol exchanges votes directly and stores them as certificates in block footers, so transactions-per-second (TPS) counters no longer see them. At the handover, the last TowerBFT block had 1,051 transactions, including 649 votes, while the first Alpenglow block had 1,701 transactions and no votes; 844 of those 1,701 hit execution errors, leaving 857 successful. The Solana Foundation’s upgrade documentation attributes the lower transaction counts and TPS to a change in accounting rather than reduced throughput.