Solana Alpenglow Goes Live in 'Most Ambitious' Upgrade Since Ethereum's Merge

Solana's largest consensus upgrade since the network launched in 2020 went live on Wednesday, cutting the time it takes for a transaction to become irreversible from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds, core engineering team Anza said. Validators retired TowerBFT, the consensus protocol Solana had used since March 2020, at slot 459,653,000 at around 14:00 UTC. They switched systems on the running network while carrying its existing ledger forward, with independent operators coordinati...