01
Solana swapped out its core consensus engine live on mainnet on October 21, 2026.
02
The new system, Votor, replaces TowerBFT, the design Solana has run on since 2020.
03
The target: cut transaction finality from roughly 12-13 seconds down to about 150 milliseconds.
04
Votor runs two paths at once: a fast one-round finish needs 80% of stake to agree instantly.
05
A slower two-round backup path needs just 60% of stake, so the network still finishes if some validators are slow.
06
The new design tolerates up to 40% combined bad or offline stake, versus roughly a third under the old system.
07
Shortly after launch, live dashboards showed finality closer to 6.6 seconds, not 150 milliseconds yet.
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The switch followed a failed test migration in May 2026 and a clean testnet rehearsal in September.