Anatoly Yakovenko announced the transition of the Alpenglow upgrade to testnet for exercises that mimic the eventual migration to mainnet-beta. This phase validates the software deployment path after a dedicated community cluster operated the version for 4 months. The upgrade modifies network consensus to make confirmed and finalized transaction states identical, streamlining how the chain reaches agreement.

Network validators must upgrade to Agave v4.3 to support the Alpenglow rollout. This version provides the technical requirements for the upgrade to move from the test environment to the live production network. The current activation path follows multiple rehearsals by the community to ensure stability before the final mainnet launch.