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Anza, a core Solana development team, announced that it has recommended Solana mainnet validators upgrade to Agave 4.0. This release includes XDP for Turbine, TPU transaction ingestion exclusively over QUIC, faster replay stages, and a suite of feature-gated SIMD instructions set to activate during this cycle. Production environment results from large mainnet validators show Turbine retransmission latency has dropped from 600 ms to approximately 0.8 ms. Additionally, UDP-based transaction ingestion has been removed, making QUIC the sole transaction submission method; simple vote transactions now follow the same cost model as regular transactions. Features including p-token, Stake Program v5, SBPFv3 program support, pre-funded account creation, and BLS12-381 system calls will also be enabled during the 4.0 cycle.
: Solana core development team Anza announced that a major consensus mechanism upgrade, codenamed Alpenglow, has been launched on the community testnet. Validators can now switch from the current Proof-of-Stake, Proof-of-History, and TowerBFT architecture to the new consensus framework within the test cluster.The upgrade shortens transaction finality time and improves network response efficiency by restructuring the validator communication and block confirmation process. This testing phase marks that validators can now execute the Alpenswitch migration operation in a real-world environment. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko previously stated that if testing goes smoothly, Alpenglow could be deployed to the mainnet as early as next quarter. (CoinDesk)
: The Solana Foundation has announced that its core development team, Anza, has reached an agreement with Jump Crypto's Firedancer on a potential post-quantum solution, planning to introduce a new digital signature scheme called Falcon. Although the threat of quantum computing is not expected to materialize for several years, Solana has already developed a phased upgrade roadmap. The plan includes ongoing research into Falcon and other alternatives, introducing post-quantum schemes for new wallets when necessary, and ultimately completing the migration of existing wallets. Currently, the quantum-resistant primitive Winternitz Vault, developed by Blueshift, has been operating on Solana for over two years. The Solana Foundation stated that the network's high-speed, low-latency design is compatible with such solutions and expects the migration will not significantly impact performance.