Solana’s new Alpenglow consensus protocol was deployed on the main network, where it replaced TowerBFT at slot 459,653,000, according to core engineering team Anza. Transactions now become irreversible in about 150 milliseconds, down from 12.8 seconds, reducing confirmation times for exchanges, banks and merchants. Alpenglow combines conditional confirmation and finality into a single step while allowing the network to operate with less than 20% of stake acting maliciously and a further 20% offline. The protocol was approved by 98% of validators in September 2025 and underwent testing on the development and test networks before activation. Further upgrades are planned, including Rotor, geographically aware leader rotation and Quantumglow, a quantum-resistant version, but no deployment dates have been set.
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