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Solana Alpenglow Goes Live in 'Most Ambitious' Upgrade Since Ethereum's Merge

Solana's new Alpenglow consensus protocol has gone live on mainnet-beta, replacing TowerBFT, which the network had used since March 2020, according to developer Anza. Transaction finality drops from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds, a change Anza says matters for exchanges, banks and merchants. The upgrade passed public testing and was approved by validators with 98% of votes in September 2025, while future upgrades such as Rotor and Quantumglow, a post-quantum version, have no committed dates.

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Solana

Relevance: medium

MarketCrypto
ExchangeBinance
SectorLayer 1
Market cap$61.0B
Close on 10/20/2026106.54
Change that session+1.39%
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