Solana has begun rolling its Alpenglow consensus overhaul onto testnet, the first public step toward replacing TowerBFT with a system aimed at roughly 150-millisecond finality. The rollout lands as SOL trades near its strongest level since late January, with network activity and tokenized-asset totals both expanding.
Solana has started rolling Alpenglow onto testnet, moving its planned consensus overhaul into a public testing environment for the first time. The upgrade targets finality of about 150 milliseconds, down from roughly 12.8 seconds under TowerBFT, the consensus mechanism Solana validators currently use to agree on blocks.
Votor rollout targets faster finality
Alpenglow's first phase introduces Votor, which replaces onchain vote transactions with votes sent directly between validators. Those votes combine into certificates that can finalize a block within one or two rounds, cutting the wait for an irreversible transaction by about 99%. The overhaul leaves the Solana Virtual Machine, transactions, programs, and fees unchanged, and a separate component called Rotor will later replace Turbine, Solana's system for distributing block data.
Anza, the developer behind Solana's Agave validator software, said testnet was entering the rollout process ahead of deployments on devnet and eventually mainnet-beta. The change follows a wave of prior upgrades: Solana activated Transaction V1 this month, lifting maximum transaction size to 4,096 bytes from 1,232, while its slot-time roadmap has progressively cut its target from 400 milliseconds toward 200 milliseconds.
SOL nears January highs as activity expands
The technical push arrives alongside a recovery in SOL. The token traded around $117 after reaching almost $120 this week, its strongest level since late January. It has gained roughly 25% over the past month.
Tokenized real-world assets on Solana reached about $4.6 billion in early September, extending a climb that pushed the sector past $4 billion for the first time in August. Trading activity has accelerated too: Solana decentralized exchanges recorded about 208 million spot trades in the week ending September 13, compared with roughly 190 million on the New York Stock Exchange. Jupiter alone accounted for more than 80 million trades in September, up 38% from the previous month.
Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani reportedly said he expects Solana's market cap to surpass Ethereum's during the current market cycle, pointing to Solana's recent lead over Ethereum in network fees. The gap remains wide: his comparison put Solana near $58 billion against about $293 billion for Ethereum.
For Solana, the next test moves back to the network itself, as validators and infrastructure providers use testnet to check whether Alpenglow holds up before it advances toward devnet and mainnet-beta.
Source: CryptoSlate
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