Anza is additionally developing additional protocol updates, such as Rotor, which aims to enhance block propagation.
Solana validators swapped out the blockchain’s legacy consensus mechanism on Wednesday, shrinking transaction finality times down to milliseconds via a live network upgrade.
In an announcement provided to The Block, Solana core development shop Anza noted that its Alpenglow consensus framework went live on the mainnet-beta at slot 459,653,000 around 14:00 UTC. The release phases out TowerBFT, which had served as Solana’s underlying consensus protocol since the network debuted in March 2020.
This protocol transition streamlines Solana’s past two-phase transaction verification workflow into a unified step, compressing finality from 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds for trading platforms handling deposits and retail vendors accepting payments, per Anza.
Brennan Watt, CEO of Anza, stated that this represents the biggest and most challenging ledger upgrade since The Merge, noting that the team transitioned Alpenglow from a white paper to active mainnet operation in less than a year and a half.
Anza originally introduced the Alpenglow architecture in May 2025. The company explained that the update went through rigorous public evaluation, incorporating red teaming, vulnerability testing, numerous migration drills, and a security audit competition ahead of the mainnet rollout.
Significantly, the developers highlighted additional prospective enhancements, although no specific launch timelines have been established. Anza explained that Rotor aims to transform how block information propagates through the network, while location-aware leader scheduling seeks to minimize latency between block creators.
Additionally, a distinct research proposal called Quantumglow aims to swap out Alpenglow’s elliptic-curve cryptography for hash-based signatures to tackle post-quantum security requirements while maintaining its rapid finality performance, according to the update.
In September 2025, following the anticipated Alpenglow rollout, the Firedancer group at Jump Crypto suggested eliminating the 60 million compute-unit ceiling on Solana blocks. Specifically, proposal SIMD-0370 would enable block capacity to scale according to validator hardware specifications instead of being restricted by a static maximum.
Originally published at https://www.theblock.co/news/ecosystems/2026-10-21-anzas-alpenglow-goes-live-on-solana-cutting-finality-to-150-milliseconds-421508.
