Solana Activates Alpenglow on Mainnet, Swapping Out TowerBFT for a Faster Consensus Engine

Solana moved its mainnet onto the Alpenglow consensus protocol on Wednesday, retiring TowerBFT , the voting system the network had used since 2020. “Alpenglow is now live on Solana mainnet,” the official Solana account posted at 13:59 UTC. Anza, the developer that built the protocol, had declared it live five minutes earlier. The chain itself records the switch. Unchained’s queries of Solana’s public mainnet RPC show the final TowerBFT-era block, slot 459,652,999 , stamped at about 13:54:00 UTC , and the network’s Alpenglow genesis certificate points to that block. Eight slots then passed with no block before slot 459,653,008 arrived at 13:54:03 UTC. Block heights continued in sequence, with no sign of a rollback. That timing beat Anza’s own estimates.

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