Solana Alpenglow Upgrade Fails to Launch on September 28 Amid Misinterpreted Schedule
Solana's highly anticipated Alpenglow consensus upgrade did not activate on mainnet as expected, despite widespread reports pointing to September 28. According to Roger Wattenhofer, head of research at Solana development firm Anza and a professor at ETH Zurich, 'There is no Alpenrush.'
The confusion appears to have originated with the release schedule for Agave v4.3, which identified September 28 as the date on which Solana mainnet-beta would resume feature activation. However, this did not include Alpenglow as one of the features scheduled to activate that day.
Alpenglow is a major upgrade that changes Solana's underlying consensus architecture and aims to dramatically shorten the time required for the network to reach finality. Developers have targeted approximately 150-millisecond finality, compared with roughly 12.8 seconds for full finality under Solana's existing architecture.