Alpenglow is officially running on devnet ⛰️🎉 The handoff completed at slot 504148999: Alpenglow genesis block formed and TowerBFT is retired. App developers: test your programs and integrations now during our observation period leading up to mainnet-beta migration.

With alpenglow coming to devnet in two hours, let's have another look together at the migration guide. It will hopefully also have a live view of the transition from tower to alpenglow ready for the devnet launch. 🤞

The Alpenglow feature gate activates on devnet today. Feature gate flips at epoch 1167, ~19:40 UTC Friday Sept 25, starting a 5,000 slot countdown. ~17 minutes later, Alpenglow takes over. App developers, get ready to test your programs with 150ms finality.

The Alpenglow feature gate is active on testnet. The 5,000 slot countdown is running, ~17 minutes to the migration boundary. At the boundary: validators confirm the final TowerBFT block at 82% of stake, then Votor takes over on testnet. Alpenglow testnet genesis block incoming.

New paper alert! 🚨 Weighted Batched Threshold Encryption with Efficient DKG w/ Alexander Frolov, @AditiPartap97, and @ErtemNusretTas In multi proposer consensus, transactions should be hidden until “valency”, the point of no return at which the consensus outcome has been decided. The cleanest way to achieve this property is with threshold encryption. But existing schemes forced difficult tradeoffs between batched, weighted, and efficient schemes. I asked the @a16zcrypto research summer interns if they could come up with a new scheme that was weighted, batched, performant, and didn’t require a trusted setup. Turns out they did!!! With some optimizations, I was able to get decryption for up to 16 simultaneous proposals to run in ~40ms on 12 cores with thousands of virtual shares and decryption shares that are small enough to fit in a single UDP packet along with the rest of the vote data. This leaves enough performance headroom room on my dev box to run a full Solana validator at the tip with the remaining cores!!! These results, along with other recent work in threshold encryption are finally pushing threshold encryption into the realm of practicality for use in the Solana protocol. We still have some more optimizations to try so we might be able to push it even lower!

The Alpenglow feature gate activates on testnet tomorrow. Feature gate flips at epoch 1042, ~17:30 UTC Thursday Sept 24, starting a 5,000 slot countdown. ~17 minutes later, Alpenglow takes over. We'll post when countdown starts and when Alpenglow is officially running. ⏱️

🚨 Testnet operators: Alpenglow activation on testnet only runs on Agave. If you're on Firedancer or Frankendancer today, switch over to an Agave node before the migration window so your stake counts toward activation. Details in the thread below 👇