Turbine is Solana's block propagation protocol, inspired by BitTorrent. When a validator produces a block, Turbine breaks it into small data packets and distributes them across the validator network in a tree structure, with each validator responsible for forwarding packets to a subset of peers.

This divide-and-distribute approach means the block producer does not need to send the entire block to every validator. The network bandwidth requirement grows logarithmically with the number of validators rather than linearly.

Turbine is essential to Solana's scalability — without it, producing large blocks quickly enough for high throughput would require impractical network bandwidth from block-producing validators.