Solana’s new consensus system, Alpenglow, took over from TowerBFT at about 13:54 UTC (15:54 CEST) on Wednesday, Anza said on X and a public Solana RPC node confirmed. Consensus is the process by which the network’s validators agree on which blocks are final.
The switch was set for epoch 1064, as our 14 Oct explainer on the switch described. The epoch began at about 13:36 UTC, and TowerBFT kept running for the 5,000-slot handover window the Solana Foundation’s upgrade page set out.
Anza, the developer firm that built the upgrade, said the Alpenglow genesis block had formed and TowerBFT was retired. It gave the genesis slot as 459,653,000, said 654 validators took part and put the handoff at 900 milliseconds.
Post by @anza_xyz on X: https://x.com/anza_xyz/status/2112905481476091961
The network’s own record matches. A query to Solana’s getAgGenesisCert method, which the Foundation says returns nothing until the new consensus is in charge, came back empty at 13:53:28 UTC and returned a certificate at 13:54:08 UTC. The certificate points to block 459,652,999, the last slot before the boundary, produced at 13:54:00 UTC.
Finality is the point after which a transaction can no longer be reversed. Anza says Alpenglow cuts it from about 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds. CryptoWatchDesk did not measure finality time; at 13:56 UTC, the node’s finalized slot was two slots behind its newest one.
Where the votes went
Under TowerBFT, each validator’s vote was itself a transaction written into a block. Alpenglow has validators send votes to each other and bundle them into certificates, so they no longer appear on-chain as transactions.
The change showed up within minutes. In the node’s one-minute performance samples, vote transactions ran at about 178,000 to 186,000 a minute before the boundary. The two samples after it showed zero and one.
Total transactions per minute fell from about 286,000 to between 94,000 and 102,000. Non-vote transactions, the payments, swaps and transfers users send, stayed in their usual range of about 94,000 to 107,000.
That matters for anyone who ranks blockchains by transaction count. Solana’s headline figure fell by roughly two-thirds in minutes, with no drop in what users did.
The upgrade follows the move to 200-millisecond slots earlier this month. Not every client made the switch: the Foundation’s page says Firedancer and Frankendancer are not supported during the migration, and their operators were told to move to an Agave-based client before the epoch began.
At 13:56 UTC, 664 vote accounts were current and 13 delinquent, holding 99.0% and 1.0% of activated stake respectively, the RPC node showed. A delinquent validator is one that has stopped voting on recent slots.
SOL was trading at $106.56 as of 13:56 UTC, up 1.9% in 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. Rotor, the half of Alpenglow that changes how block data is spread across the network, is not yet scheduled.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.