Major Solana Upgrade Alpenglow Begins Testing Ahead of Full Rollout

In brief

• Alpenglow, a protocol upgrade that will make Solana's network even faster, entered a community validator testing phase on Monday.
• The community test cluster will allow for testing with external operators and is one of the final steps before a mainnet launch.
• The upgrade could be ready as soon as Q3 or Q4 this year.

Alpenglow, a protocol upgrade set to make Solana’s layer-1 network much faster, is moving closer to a mainnet rollout. 

On Monday, Solana research and development firm Anza announced that Alpenglow went live on the community test cluster, allowing Solana validator operators to start testing the consensus upgrade ahead of its push to mainnet. 

“This is a really exciting milestone,” Anza Lead Economist Max Resnick told Decrypt. “The Alpenglow source code is mature enough in Agave master that we can begin testing with real community operators.” 

The Agave master is Anza’s validator, and is a fork of the original Solana validator operated by Solana Labs according to Anza’s documentation. Resnick noted that Alpenglow had previously been tested on up to 45 internal node clusters, but the latest move allows the firm to test with external operators. 

“We are particularly interested in the performance of the migration between towerBFT and Alpenglow which went smoothly on the test cluster and we will continue testing switching back and forth on the cluster,” said Resnick. “We saw that after the switch over time to finality came down ~100x.”

The pending move to Alpenglow was approved last September after validators voted 98% in favor of the protocol upgrade as part of a Solana improvement proposal (SIMD-0236). The upgrade will reconfigure Solana’s existing consensus protocol—towerBFT—with the aim of making the network speed more akin to the centralized infrastructure that supports traditional financial rails. 

“Apps are going to feel a lot snappier and exchanges will be able to safely credit deposits much faster than the full 12.8 second finality window they adhere to today,” Resnick told Decrypt in September following Alpenglow’s approval. 

At that time, it was hoped Alpenglow may be ready as early as Q1 for a mainnet release, but now the timeline has been bumped back a bit.