Chorus One: Solana's New Consensus Mechanism Alpenglow Compared to the Economic Incentives and Trade-offs of the Existing PoH

PoS blockchain validation node operator Chorus One published an article analyzing Solana's new consensus mechanism, Alpenglow, compared to the existing PoH, in terms of economic incentives and trade-offs. Alpenglow increases Byzantine fault tolerance from 33% to 40%, but requires lower network latency (150ms vs 400ms), reduces MEV收益 from arbitrage by approximately 38% and sandwich attacks by 24%, and may drive geographical centralization of validators. Shard propagation design prioritizes high-stake validators, which may impose a latency tax on small validators, affecting decentralization. Removing PoH may increase the burden of processing invalid transactions. The reward mechanism is easily manipulated, such as through self-reporting, voting delays, etc., and randomness leads to fluctuations in the income of low-stake validators. Alpenglow needs to optimize parameters to balance security, efficiency, and fairness. [Wu Shuo]