Solana Targets 150ms Finality With Alpenglow Upgrade

Solana replaced TowerBFT with Alpenglow on its mainnet on October 21, in its most significant consensus change since launch. The new protocol targets a finality close to 150 milliseconds, compared to about 12.8 seconds previously, but part of the planned architecture is still to be deployed. The activation began at the start of epoch 1064. However, the network retained TowerBFT for the first 5000 slots of this epoch, about 18 minutes, to prepare the transition to the new system. The transition completed at slot 459653000. The validators then formed the cryptographic certificate marking the birth of the Alpenglow consensus.