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Alpenglow Forms Genesis Certificate for Solana Migration
Metal · 21 Oct 2026
The Release
The Solana consensus protocol, released on Oct. 21, 2026, went live on mainnet-beta with off-chain validator voting. Alpenglow paired consensus research with erasure-coded data distribution at that moment. Its genesis block formed and TowerBFT was retired as the protocol took over.
A migration feature gate activated the switch at an epoch boundary. Past the migration boundary, blocks carried only votes and could be rolled back with no loss of user transactions.
Voting Component
Votor is the voting component of Alpenglow that ran two voting modes to finalize each block. Validator votes moved off chain as direct BLS-signed messages between nodes. Vote signatures were aggregated into one compact certificate, leaving blockspace for users.
Each node ran its own timers and identified a silent leader on its own. Nodes voted to skip a silent leader, a skip certificate formed and the chain moved on. A confirmed block was a finalized block, giving deterministic finality.
Migration Details
Validators signed a BLS vote for the genesis block, forming a genesis certificate. That certificate was written to an onchain account as a record of the migration. The protocol was developed by Anza and shown on the company’s Alpenglow page.