Timeline
- 7.5
Solana’s Alpenglow Goes Live on Devnet Ahead of Mainnet Migration
Anza announced on Sept. 25 that Alpenglow, its consensus overhaul for Solana, is live on devnet, a day after the separate testnet completed its transition, and the Solana Foundation’s upgrade page lists the upgrade as active on both networks. Mainnet activation remains unscheduled. Alpenglow targets roughly 150 milliseconds for finality, against about 12.8 seconds under the existing system, which could shorten the wait for an exchange to release deposited funds or a payment app to confirm a sale to a merchant. Because validator votes move out of blocks, reported transaction totals will also shrink even if user activity is unchanged. Validators will exchange votes directly instead of recording them as transactions inside blocks, allowing agreement in one or two voting rounds, and the Solana Foundation has told data providers to adjust their comparisons. The 150-millisecond figure comes from simulations rather than live-market results, and wallet processing and exchanges’ own deposit checks can add further waiting time; applications that only send transactions and read account balances require no migration.
- 7.5
Solana moves Alpenglow into testnet as SOL nears January highs
Solana has begun rolling its Alpenglow consensus overhaul onto testnet, the first public deployment of the upgrade that replaces TowerBFT with the Votor voting mechanism. Anza, the developer behind Solana's Agave validator client, said testnet is entering the rollout process, ahead of deployments on devnet and eventually mainnet-beta. The rollout is the first broad environment in which validators and infrastructure providers can run Alpenglow before it advances to devnet and mainnet. The migration requires those operators to adjust systems that stream blocks, track votes, or rely on Solana's existing commitment structure. The upgrade targets finality of about 150 milliseconds, down from roughly 12.8 seconds under TowerBFT, while leaving the Solana Virtual Machine, transactions, programs and fees unchanged. Its first phase introduces Votor, which replaces onchain vote transactions with votes sent directly between validators and combined into certificates that can finalize a block in one or two voting rounds, cutting the wait for an irreversible transaction by about 99%; Rotor, a replacement for the Turbine block-data distribution system, is scheduled separately.