There's an official way to speed up syncing a Bitcoin node, the one the Bitcoin Core developers recommend themselves. It's called AssumeUTXO. It uses special UTXO snapshots, and the snapshot block heights are hardcoded right into Bitcoin Core.
The newest snapshot it supports sits at height 935,000, which is February 4, 2026. Every block after that, up to today, you still sync the normal way. You just wait for the node to catch up.
Get Bitcoin Core and the snapshot
Download Bitcoin Core from the official site, bitcoincore.org. Grab the .tar.gz build, because it ships with the bitcoin-cli client, and that's what you need to load the snapshot into the node.
Then download the snapshot itself. You can get it by direct link from this website (thanks jaonoctus). At a decent connection speed it's about a 10-minute download. These snapshots are created with the dumptxoutset command, run on a fully synced node that already has the blocks at the height you want.
Load the snapshot
Open a terminal and start the node:
./bitcoin-qt -server -printtoconsole
In a second terminal, check the blockchain state. You want all the headers to come down first:
./bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo | grep headers
Once the headers are in, turn off network syncing, load the snapshot, then turn syncing back on:
./bitcoin-cli setnetworkactive false
./bitcoin-cli -rpcclienttimeout=0 loadtxoutset /path/to/utxo-snapshot.dat
./bitcoin-cli setnetworkactive true
Let the node sync the blocks from February 4 up to today.
One thing worth knowing
Even after sync is done, the node keeps validating the full chainstate in the background. That's why you'll see two folders in your data directory, chainstate and chainstate_snapshot. It's also why your CPU stays busy until that full validation finishes across every block, and your network traffic adds up to the full size of the blockchain.
So AssumeUTXO is the safer route, since the node ends up verifying the entire chainstate. It's just slower and more complex than the chainstate.io method, where you swap in a ready snapshot and you're synced in minutes.