The Alpenglow upgrade scheduled for October 21, 2026 replaces TowerBFT, the consensus mechanism used by Solana since its 2020 launch, with a new consensus mechanism named Votor

How changes to Bitcoin's rules get proposed, fought over and adopted, from improvement proposals and soft forks to upgrade debates like quantum resistance.

Rules by which distributed networks agree on a shared ledger, from proof of work mining to proof of stake validation, trading off security, energy use, and decentralization.