Solana Takes a Giant Leap With Its Biggest Network Upgrade Since 2020: Why Alpenglow Has SOL Bulls Excited

Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade went live on Wednesday, replacing the TowerBFT consensus mechanism used since the network’s March 2020 launch and introducing a redesigned voting system intended to speed transaction finality. Anza, Solana’s core engineering firm, confirmed the protocol reached mainnet-beta at slot 459,653,000 at about 14:00 UTC. The upgrade collapses a two-step confirmation process into one, reducing finality time from roughly 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds; Solana’s dashboard showed 207 milliseconds and 2,644 transactions per second at the time of writing. Validators are expected next to consider Agave 4.5, planned for December 2026, which would raise the number of accounts supported by a versioned transaction from 64 to 96.