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Solana activates Anza’s Alpenglow consensus upgrade

Anza activated Alpenglow on Solana mainnet, replacing TowerBFT and targeting 150-millisecond finality as validators certify blocks in one or two voting rounds.

The Top Crypto Editors 2 min read

Solana activates Anza’s Alpenglow consensus upgrade

Is Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade live? Yes: validators activated Anza’s new consensus protocol on mainnet on October 21, replacing TowerBFT and targeting finality in about 150 milliseconds, down from roughly 12.8 seconds. The Block reported that the change took effect at slot 459,653,000 at about 14:00 UTC. Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade documentation confirms the mainnet activation and describes 150 milliseconds as a target, not a guaranteed time for every transaction.

How does Alpenglow change block finality?

Alpenglow’s Votor protocol has validators send votes directly to each other and combine them into certificates, instead of recording votes as transactions on-chain. Solana says a block can then become final after one or two rounds of voting; under TowerBFT, finality took about 12.8 seconds. The upgrade changes how validators agree on blocks, while transaction execution, fees and the Solana Virtual Machine remain unchanged.

That distinction matters if you build or monitor on Solana. Vote transactions no longer appear in blocks, so dashboards that counted them will show fewer transactions even if user activity has not fallen. The upgrade documentation also says “confirmed” and “finalized” now describe the same state.

What does the 150-millisecond figure mean for users?

It is the target time for a transaction to become irreversible, not the interval between blocks. Faster finality could let exchanges credit deposits and merchants accept payments with less waiting, but the actual time for an app or service to show finality can vary. Anza’s figure describes the protocol target under normal conditions.

For you as a wallet user, sending transactions works as before; the main change is how quickly the network reaches finality. The protocol also rolls out in phases: Votor is live, while the planned Rotor change to block propagation has no scheduled release date. Watch for Anza to announce when Rotor is due.

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