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.”
“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.”
“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.
“Next steps will be Alpenglow officially cut in an Agave release soon and then activated on testnet,” he said. After that time, if the release goes well on Anza’s Agave validator and Solana’s testnet, it could be released on Solana’s layer-1 mainnet.
“If everything goes well we are looking at late Q3, early Q4 mainnet activation,” he added.
While Solana has jumped 14.7% in the last 30 days of trading, it remains nearly 67% off its January 2025 all-time high mark of $293.31.
