Update
Solana Alpenglow Upgrade Live
Solana's largest consensus protocol upgrade since its 2020 launch went live, reducing transaction finality time from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. Validators retired TowerBFT, the network's consensus protocol, at slot 459,653,000, and switched to Alpenglow, a new protocol that combines finality into a single step. The upgrade went through public testing and was implemented in Agave, the validator software maintained by Anza. Anza's research team, led by Roger Wattenhofer, published the Alpenglow design in May 2025.