Anza Publishes an Alpenglow Overview and Names No Mainnet Date
Anza's Alpenglow page marks testnet and devnet complete and mainnet-beta as upcoming. It names no date. The page calls SIMD-0384 the migration feature gate.
Testnet and devnet are complete
Anza has published an overview page for Alpenglow. Testnet and devnet are marked complete there, dated September 24 and September 25. Mainnet-beta is marked upcoming. The page says the migration will be announced once the observation period has confirmed the earlier runs. It names no date. At the top of the page, finality is given as 150 milliseconds. The page does not give a mainnet measurement.
How the Page Describes the Migration
The page names SIMD-0384 as the migration feature gate. It activates at an epoch boundary. Nothing migrates immediately. The migration boundary sits 5,000 slots later. From there, blocks carry no user transactions, only votes. Validators wait for a block that receives votes from at least 82 percent of stake in the following slot. The last ancestor of that block before the boundary becomes the Alpenglow genesis block. At 82 percent of stake, the genesis certificate forms. Validators then discard everything after that block, hand consensus to Votor, and allow user transactions again. TowerBFT is retired. The page expects the handoff to take a few hundred milliseconds.
On voting, the page says Votor runs two paths at the same time. One finalizes a block in a single round if 80 percent of stake responds. The other finalizes at 60 percent after two rounds. The path that finalizes first wins. Votes no longer run as transactions on the chain. They are direct messages between nodes, signed with BLS, and aggregated into one certificate. The page states a tolerance of 20 percent adversarial stake and 20 percent offline stake, both at once.
Per the page, Proof of History is gone. Every node runs its own timers and identifies a silent leader on its own. Nodes vote to skip the slot. Once a skip certificate forms, the chain moves on.
Rotor and the leader handoff
The page lists Rotor next, then a faster handoff between leaders and a geographically shorter handoff. Rotor is to replace Turbine’s multi-layer tree with a single relay hop. Blocks are erasure-coded into slices, and every node relays a share proportional to its stake. On the faster handoff, block production is meant to start optimistically, before finalization. The geographic version is meant to shorten the distance between consecutive leaders.
The page calls the migration gate SIMD-0384. In Anza’s feature-gate tracker, the gate active on testnet at epoch 1042 and on devnet at epoch 1167 is still SIMD-0326. SIMD-0326 is the consensus proposal. SIMD-0384 is the migration, and it depends on SIMD-0326. The distinction is in the testnet migration report. Per-network status is on Alpenglow status. How Votor works in the protocol is in Alpenglow: Solana’s new consensus.
Note: This is reporting, not investment advice.
What to Watch
- When Anza names a date for the mainnet migration
Sources
- Anza — Alpenglow overview
- SIMD-0384 — Alpenglow migration
- SIMD-0326 — Alpenglow
- Anza — Feature-gate tracker