Off-chain voting will replace TowerBFT as the core consensus mechanism for the Solana blockchain to eliminate the latency between transaction confirmation and finality. Anza, the network's development team, deployed the Alpenglow upgrade to public testnet on September 24 to slash transaction finality from approximately 13 seconds to 0.15 seconds, a shift described by some participants as the most significant consensus change in the network's history.

The update will move to devnet before its potential deployment to mainnet-beta following an observation period. A community cluster rehearsed the migration multiple times over the previous four months before this formal activation began. The change equates confirmed and finalized transaction states to widen the performance gap between Solana and other competing blockchains.