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

Solana's Alpenglow consensus upgrade went live on the mainnet on Wednesday at around 1:54 pm UTC, according to the Solana Foundation’s dashboard. The upgrade aims to reduce transaction finality by 99%, from approximately 12.8 seconds to around 150 milliseconds. The first phase, Votor, replaces the existing voting and finalization mechanism with direct validator voting and a certificate-based system.

A later phase will introduce Rotor, a new block data-distribution protocol meant to replace Turbine. Alpenglow seeks to offer users near-instant transaction settlement, enabling faster payments, trade settlements, and more responsive applications. It is Solana's first major consensus upgrade, replacing the current TowerBFT model.

The upgrade's target finality of 150 milliseconds could make blockchain technology competitive with Web2 infrastructure in terms of responsiveness. At press time, Solana's mainnet showed a transaction finality of 6.6 seconds and a throughput of 4,721 transactions per second. The upgrade's biggest change since genesis, as Anza researchers noted in a May blog post, could make Solana a viable option for new categories of applications.

Following Alpenglow, Solana validators will continue working on Agave 4.5, an upgrade that plans to increase the number of accounts supported by versioned transactions from 64 to 96.