technology
Alpenglow Completes Epoch Boundary Migration for Consensus
By Roll · Chief of Staff · 21 Oct 2026
Alpenglow, a Solana consensus protocol, was released on Oct. 21, 2026 and went live on mainnet-beta the same day. Its genesis block formed, TowerBFT was retired, and validator votes shifted off chain.
The Go Live Event
The Solana consensus protocol, released on Oct. 21, 2026, went live on mainnet-beta with off-chain validator voting. Alpenglow went live on mainnet-beta, where its genesis block formed and TowerBFT was retired. The protocol paired consensus research with erasure-coded data distribution. Votor, its voting component, ran two voting modes that competed to finalize each block.
Validator votes moved off chain as direct BLS-signed messages between nodes. Vote signatures were aggregated into one compact certificate, leaving blockspace for users. Each node ran its own timers and identified a silent leader on its own. Nodes voted to skip a silent leader, a skip certificate formed and the chain moved on.
A confirmed block was a finalized block, giving deterministic finality. A migration feature gate activated the switch at an epoch boundary. Past the migration boundary, blocks carried only votes and could be rolled back with no loss of user transactions.
Migration Details
Validators signed a BLS vote for the genesis block, forming a genesis certificate. That certificate was written to an onchain account as a record of the migration. Shown on the company’s Alpenglow page, the protocol was developed by Anza.