Solana Activates Alpenglow Upgrade on Devnet

Solana's next big upgrade, Alpenglow, has activated on the network's devnet after a successful migration. Co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko commented, 'You're not ready for this,' in response to the upgrade.

The update replaces the TowerBFT algorithm with Votor, a voting system developed by researchers from ETH Zurich and approved by validators under SIMD-0326. This change moves validator coordination off-chain.

Alpenglow is designed to reduce transaction finality time from 12.8 seconds to 100-150 milliseconds. It also aggregates technical vote transactions into compact cryptographic BLS certificates, freeing up block capacity for user transactions and lowering costs for node operators.