Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade launches on mainnet for faster finality

Alpenglow upgrade — Solana‘s first major consensus upgrade, Alpenglow, has launched on the network’s mainnet, targeting a 99% reduction in transaction finality time.

The upgrade’s initial phase, Votor, went live on Wednesday, replacing the existing TowerBFT consensus model with a new certificate-based system. The Solana Foundation aims to cut finality from roughly 12.8 seconds to approximately 150 milliseconds, promising near-instant settlement for payments and trades.

Researchers from Anza, a core Solana development firm, have called Alpenglow the “biggest change to Solana’s core protocol” since its inception. They argue that sub-second latency could make the blockchain competitive with traditional Web2 infrastructure for new application categories.

According to the project’s dashboard, the Solana mainnet was showing a transaction finality of 6.6 seconds at the time of the report. The native SOL token’s price rose nearly 3% in the 24 hours leading up to the upgrade’s activation.