Solana has completed its biggest “engine swap” in six years.
On October 21 (UTC), the Alpenglow consensus protocol officially went live on mainnet at slot 459,653,000, and TowerBFT was retired. The voting system had remained unchanged since Solana launched in March 2020.
The key change: validators no longer record votes as on-chain transactions (votes previously accounted for about 62% of on-chain transaction volume). Instead, they vote directly off-chain, with BLS signatures aggregated into certificates. The target for deterministic finality: cut from 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds.
But keep a clear head: 150 ms is a design target, and no real-world performance data has been released yet. The next phase, Rotor (a redesign of block propagation), also has no scheduled date. Technical value is one thing; price is another—SOL is still hovering around $104 today, and the upgrade’s positive impact hasn’t translated into short-term price action.
$SOL #Alpenglow #Solana
On October 21 (UTC), the Alpenglow consensus protocol officially went live on mainnet at slot 459,653,000, and TowerBFT was retired. The voting system had remained unchanged since Solana launched in March 2020.
The key change: validators no longer record votes as on-chain transactions (votes previously accounted for about 62% of on-chain transaction volume). Instead, they vote directly off-chain, with BLS signatures aggregated into certificates. The target for deterministic finality: cut from 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds.
But keep a clear head: 150 ms is a design target, and no real-world performance data has been released yet. The next phase, Rotor (a redesign of block propagation), also has no scheduled date. Technical value is one thing; price is another—SOL is still hovering around $104 today, and the upgrade’s positive impact hasn’t translated into short-term price action.
$SOL #Alpenglow #Solana