What Is Solana Alpenglow? SwissBorg Congratulates Solana on Its Biggest Upgrade Yet
Dan Stokes
Community Growth
The Solana Alpenglow upgrade went live on 21 October 2026. It is the biggest change to how the network reaches agreement since Solana launched in 2020. Transactions that once took around 12.8 seconds to become final now target around 150 milliseconds.
Congratulations to Anza, the Solana Foundation and every validator and builder who made it happen. As one of Solana's longest-standing supporters, we couldn't be prouder.
Here's what Alpenglow is, why it matters and what it means for you.
The information in this article comes from Anza's Alpenglow white paper, the Anza website and the Solana Foundation.
What Is Solana Alpenglow?
Alpenglow is Solana's new consensus protocol: the set of rules validators follow to agree on which transactions happened and in what order. Designed and built by Anza, it replaces TowerBFT, the protocol Solana has run since day one.
Its headline improvement is finality, the moment a transaction can no longer be reversed.
| Before Alpenglow (TowerBFT) | With Alpenglow | |
| Time to finality | Around 12.8 seconds | Around 150 milliseconds (target) |
| Validator votes | Posted on-chain as transactions | Exchanged off-chain, recorded as a compact certificate |
| Blockspace | Shared with validator votes | Freed up for users |
That's roughly 85 times faster. In simulations published in the Alpenglow white paper, the median node finalised a block in roughly 110 milliseconds, and even the slowest node finalised in under 200 milliseconds.
Solana's validators backed the change through governance proposal SIMD-0326 in September 2025, with 98.94% voting in favour.
Why Does Finality Matter?
Think of a card payment. It shows as "pending" first, and only later as fully cleared. Finality is the blockchain version of "cleared".
Solana has always felt fast, but full finality took several seconds. With Alpenglow, as the Solana Foundation's Alpenglow upgrade page explains, "confirmed" and "finalised" effectively become the same thing.
Payments, trades and transfers on Solana can be treated as settled almost the instant they happen, which brings on-chain experiences closer to the speed of the apps we use every day.
How Does Alpenglow Work?
Alpenglow arrives in two parts.
Votor (live now) is the new voting engine. Under TowerBFT, validators voted by sending transactions, and those votes made up the bulk of entries on Solana's ledger.
With Votor, validators send votes directly to each other and combine them into a single compact certificate. A block is finalised in one round if validators holding 80% of staked SOL agree, or in two rounds at 60%, whichever completes first.
Rotor (coming later) will replace Turbine, the system Solana uses to spread block data across the network, with a simpler single relay layer.
According to the white paper, Rotor uses each validator's bandwidth in proportion to its stake, removing the bottleneck of a single block leader. It has not yet been scheduled.
Alpenglow is also built to stay resilient. The white paper describes "20+20" resilience: the network can tolerate an adversary controlling 20% of stake, with a further 20% of stake offline, under stronger network conditions.
Importantly, everything users touch stays the same: transaction formats, fees and how you sign and send transactions are unchanged.
Built by Anza
Alpenglow is the work of Anza, the engineering firm spun out of Solana Labs in 2024 that develops Agave, Solana's majority validator client.
Anza took Alpenglow from peer-reviewed research to production with real care: simulations across 1,500 nodes, nine successful migrations at scale, and testnet and devnet launches in September 2026 before the mainnet switch. A huge achievement, and a big thank you to the whole Anza team.
There's a Swiss connection we can't resist mentioning, too. The Alpenglow white paper, by Quentin Kniep, Jakub Sliwinski and Roger Wattenhofer of Anza, was written in Zurich, and its headline latency simulation places the block leader there.
As a platform engineered in Switzerland, we at SwissBorg love seeing world-class blockchain research come out of our home country, under a name that will feel familiar to anyone who has watched the evening light glow pink across the Alps.
The paper also looks ahead, outlining Quantumglow, a research design for adapting Alpenglow to be secure against future quantum computers. It has no set release date, but it shows the long-term thinking behind Solana's roadmap.
Why SwissBorg Backs Solana
Our support for Solana goes well beyond a congratulations post.
- First chain on our Meta-Exchange. In 2023, Solana became the first blockchain connected directly to what is now the SwissBorg Meta-Exchange, bringing Solana DEX liquidity alongside centralised exchanges. Read more on why we chose Solana.
- Our biggest source of DEX liquidity. Solana accounts for by far the largest share of the DEX volume our Meta-Exchange connects to, with venues like Meteora, PumpSwap and Raydium helping us search for the best available prices for your trades.
- BORG lives on Solana. We bridged our own BORG token to Solana using Wormhole's Native Token Transfers, so you can move BORG directly between the SwissBorg app and the Solana network.
Faster finality on Solana is great news for every trade routed through it, and we can't wait to see what builders create with it.
New to Solana? Start with our Academy guides: What Is Solana (SOL)?, The Most Popular Solana Use Cases and How to Stake Solana.
Then follow the SOL price and explore Solana's ecosystem in the SwissBorg app.
Solana Alpenglow Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Alpenglow is Solana's new consensus protocol, built by Anza. It replaces TowerBFT and targets transaction finality of around 150 milliseconds, down from around 12.8 seconds.
Alpenglow was designed and built by Anza, the developer of Agave, Solana's majority validator client. Solana validators approved it through governance proposal SIMD-0326.
Yes. The Solana Alpenglow Consensus white paper (v1.2, July 2026) by Quentin Kniep, Jakub Sliwinski and Roger Wattenhofer of Anza sets out how Votor and Rotor work, Alpenglow's "20+20" resilience and its Quantumglow post-quantum research.
The first part, Votor, activated on Solana mainnet on 21 October 2026, at slot 459,653,000 in epoch 1064. The second part, Rotor, does not have a date yet. You can follow its progress on the Solana Foundation's Alpenglow upgrade page.
Votor is Alpenglow's voting protocol. Validators vote directly with each other rather than through on-chain transactions, and their votes are combined into one compact certificate that finalises blocks in one or two rounds.
Rotor is Alpenglow's planned replacement for Turbine, Solana's block data propagation system. It will follow in a later upgrade.
No. Firedancer is an independent validator client, the software some validators run, built by Jump Crypto as an alternative to Anza's Agave. Alpenglow is a consensus protocol: the rules validators follow to agree on which blocks are final. They are separate projects.
Alpenglow is designed for what its white paper calls "20+20" resilience: the network stays safe with up to 20% of stake controlled by an attacker, and can keep running with a further 20% of stake offline under stronger network conditions. Anza tested it with simulations across 1,500 nodes and nine migrations at scale, and backs it with a bug bounty of more than 25,000 SOL.
No. Alpenglow is a network-level upgrade. SOL holders don't need to take any action, and signing and sending transactions works exactly as before.
No. Transaction formats, fees and the account model stay the same. What changes is how quickly transactions become final.
Validator votes no longer count as on-chain transactions, so reported transactions per second fall sharply. It reflects a change in counting, not a drop in real activity.
Validators no longer pay vote transaction fees, which cost around 1 SOL per epoch. Instead, they pay a flat Validator Admission Ticket of 0.8 SOL per epoch, which is burned.
Growing Wealth Together.
Engineered in Switzerland. Licensed in Europe.
Continue the conversation:
X | Instagram | YouTube | Discord | Telegram
This is a crypto-asset marketing communication. Crypto assets are highly volatile. You risk losing all invested capital. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. You can learn more about the risks associated with crypto assets on our List of Risks page. Services are provided as set out in our Terms of Use.
Date modified:
