Anza introduces a new block propagation protocol Rotor in the Solana Alpenglow upgrade.

Wu said that Anza, a Solana ecosystem development company, tweeted about the introduction of a new block propagation protocol called Rotor in the Solana Alpenglow upgrade. Rotor replaces the multi-hop model of Turbine with a single-layer relay, where the leader splits blocks into slices, encodes each slice into fragments using erasure coding, and then sends the fragments to selected relays. The relays broadcast the fragments to all validators globally in one round. Due to erasure coding, receiving half of the fragments is sufficient to reconstruct the slices, ensuring resilience, and a relay can forward on receiving just one data packet. Rotor can balance bandwidth usage among nodes, reduce propagation time and discrepancies, allowing nearly all validators to receive blocks simultaneously, improving throughput and reducing the risk of forks. This is significant for builders and validators as it can reduce latency, stabilize confirmations, and make real-time dApps run more smoothly, minimizing missed slots and bandwidth waste for validators. In summary, Rotor enables Solana to quickly distribute large amounts of data through a single-layer design, achieving faster, more consistent block times and higher throughput. Previously, Anza proposed the Alpenglow protocol, which aims to replace Solana's TowerBFT consensus mechanism and Proof of History timestamp system, introducing the Votor and Rotor components. Votor is responsible for voting and block finality, while Rotor enhances Solana's existing block propagation protocol.