Solana Deploys Alpenglow Consensus Upgrade to Devnet for Observation

Solana has launched its next-generation consensus upgrade, Alpenglow, on the devnet, marking the retirement of the TowerBFT mechanism. Developed by Anza, the upgrade introduces a new voting protocol called Votor, which aims to reduce transaction finality from approximately 12.8 seconds to around 150 milliseconds. The transition occurred at slot 504,148,999. Anza has initiated an observation period for developers to test applications and integrations before the eventual migration to mainnet-beta.