Solana is a high-throughput Layer 1 secured by Proof of Stake. Since the Alpenglow upgrade in October 2026, its Votor consensus targets finality of about 150 ms, down from roughly 12.8 seconds under TowerBFT, and slots run at 200 ms. Proof of History no longer paces block production. At these speeds, a 50 ms delay between the validator and your application eats a third of the finality window. Shred propagation and streaming overhead now decide whether your app sees a block first or last.
GetBlock runs bare-metal Solana nodes in Frankfurt, New York and Singapore. They take shreds directly from high-stake validators and run tuned Agave clients, with accelerated Yellowstone gRPC for streaming. Outgoing transactions use SWQoS validator connections and priority BDN paths. Average RPC response stays under 10 ms for selected methods.