Solana’s Alpenglow launches on mainnet, targets 99% faster finality

Solana’s first major consensus upgrade is targeting 99% finality reduction, seeking to offer users near-immediate transaction settlement and more responsive applications. Solana’s first major consensus upgrade, Alpenglow, went live on mainnet around 1:54 pm UTC on Wednesday, according to the Solana Foundation’s Alpenglow dashboard. Alpenglow seeks to reduce transaction finality by 99%, to roughly 150 milliseconds from about 12.8 seconds, according to the Solana Foundation’s July announcement. The upgrade’s first phase, Votor, replaces the existing voting and finalization mechanism with direct validator voting and a certificate-based system designed to cut transaction finality to roughly 150 milliseconds. A later phase will introduce Rotor, a new block data-distribution protocol intended to replace Turbine. Alpenglow is Solana’s first major consensus upgrade, replacing its current consensus model, TowerBFT.