Solana Prepares Alpenglow Upgrade for Public Testnet

Solana is preparing to test its Alpenglow upgrade on the public testnet, aiming to reduce transaction finality from about 13 seconds to roughly 0.15 seconds.

The upgrade replaces TowerBFT with Votor, which allows validators to reach agreement in one or two voting rounds, compared to the current process of building enough support across 32 slots before finalizing a block.

Developers ran Alpenglow on a smaller network for more than four months and are now moving to the public testnet to test whether a broader group of validators and services can switch together.