Anza tracker still lists Solana’s Alpenglow testnet activation as pending

Solana’s Alpenglow consensus upgrade remains pending testnet activation, according to Anza’s feature-gate tracker, even though the Agave 4.3 release reached its general-adoption milestone on Sept. 21. Alpenglow’s Votor protocol is designed to replace TowerBFT and reduce finality from about 12.8 seconds to a target of roughly 150 milliseconds.

The tracker, edited Sept. 22, lists SIMD-0326, “Alpenglow: new consensus algorithm,” under pending testnet activation and names Agave v4.3.0 as the required version. Its current schedule does not confirm that the testnet switch has happened. Anza’s separate Agave 4.3 release schedule says its dates are tentative and marks Sept. 21 as the date to recommend the software for general mainnet-beta adoption.

How is Votor designed to finalize blocks faster?

Votor replaces TowerBFT’s on-chain validator votes with votes sent directly between validators, as specified in Solana’s Alpenglow proposal. Under TowerBFT, votes accumulate across 32 slots before a block is finalized. Under Votor, a block can finalize after a fast-finalization certificate based on 80% of stake voting in one round, or through a slower path requiring finalization and notarization certificates, each based on 60% thresholds.

The 150-millisecond figure is a target, not a measured result from the pending testnet activation. Alpenglow changes consensus and block finalization; Solana’s Foundation says it does not change transaction formats, fees, the account model or the SVM. Applications that send transactions and read account state therefore do not need to migrate for those changes.

What has to happen before Alpenglow reaches mainnet?

The feature-gate tracker lists Agave v4.3.0 for the testnet activation and marks Firedancer and Frankendancer as unsupported for this feature. The schedule therefore does not establish that all validator clients can participate in the initial activation.

Agave’s Sept. 28 milestone is to resume feature activation on mainnet-beta; the schedule does not identify that date as an Alpenglow launch. It also labels the rollout dates tentative. The current confirmed step is the software adoption recommendation. Alpenglow’s testnet activation—and any mainnet activation—remains unconfirmed by the tracker.