Solana Activates Alpenglow As Anza Targets Millisecond Finality

TL;DR: Anza says Alpenglow activated on Solana mainnet-beta on October 21. The consensus change targets roughly 150-millisecond finality; further networking and post-quantum improvements remain planned work. Solana has replaced the consensus protocol it used from launch, bringing a long-discussed change in transaction finality onto the live network. Core engineering firm Anza announced the Alpenglow activation at slot 459,653,000, around 14:00 UTC on Wednesday. According to the company, validators retired TowerBFT during the transition without moving activity to a separate chain. Finality Is The Point Of The Upgrade Anza describes the design as reducing the path to finality from approximately 12.8 seconds to around 150 milliseconds. That is the developer’s stated performance target, not a network-wide latency measurement independently reproduced for this article. Finality concerns when a transaction can be treated as irreversible under the network’s consensus rules. It is different from the moment a wallet displays a transaction or an application gives a user an initial confirmation. That difference is particularly relevant to payments and trading. An interface can appear responsiv...