Solana Alpenglow Upgrade Hits Public Testnet

Solana has begun moving its Alpenglow consensus upgrade to the public testnet, a crucial milestone in shrinking transaction finality from around 12.8 seconds to approximately 150 milliseconds.

The change targets Solana's TowerBFT model, which stacks validator votes recorded on-chain across 32 slots before a block is considered settled, and replaces it with Votor, where validators pass votes straight to one another and can agree on a block within a round or two.

The new code has already run for over four months on a separate network set up specifically for the upgrade. The public testnet switch will assess whether the full set of computers and services that currently run the chain can migrate in sync.