Overview
- The Alpenglow upgrade, which went live on a community validator cluster Monday, is now running on real operator hardware ahead of wider rollout.
- Early tests on the cluster cut the time to finality from about 12.8 seconds to under 150 milliseconds in controlled runs.
- Anza asked more validators to join to prove the “Alpenswitch” migration between the current towerBFT system and Alpenglow, including switching back and forth.
- The redesign removes Proof of History and on‑chain vote transactions, uses off‑chain voting with signature aggregation, and adds a 1.6 SOL Validator Admission Ticket each epoch.
- Project leaders outlined a conditional mainnet window as soon as next quarter to late Q3 or early Q4 if testing holds, after validators approved the overhaul with about 98% support last September.