Solana's Alpenglow consensus rewrite activates on a community validator test cluster
Alpenglow, which replaces Solana's TowerBFT consensus with the Votor and Rotor components, activated on a community validator test cluster on 11 May 2026.
Protocol developer
Anza
Maintainer of Agave, the validator client most of Solana's stake runs, and author of Alpenglow, the consensus redesign replacing TowerBFT; its engineering decisions set the settlement assurances tokenized funds and payment issuers on the network inherit.
The profile
Formed in January 2024 by former Solana Labs engineers and executives, the firm maintains Agave, the validator client forked from the original Solana Labs code and run by most of the network's stake. It authored Alpenglow, the consensus redesign that replaces TowerBFT with the Votor voting protocol and the Rotor propagation layer. Its engineering decisions set Solana's block time, finality and fault tolerance, and therefore the settlement assurances that tokenized funds and payment issuers on the network inherit.
Products and services
- Agave
- Solana validator client forked from the original Solana Labs implementation and operated by the majority of network stake.
- Alpenglow
- Consensus redesign replacing TowerBFT with the Votor voting protocol and the Rotor erasure-coded block propagation layer.
- Solana Kit
- JavaScript software development kit and tooling used to build applications against the Solana network.
Coverage
Developments in which Anza is a named party, newest first.