Solana’s biggest network change since 2020 is live. Here’s how users benefit

Solana activated its Alpenglow upgrade on Wednesday, introducing a revamped voting system aimed at making payments and trades final in mere milliseconds. This system reduces the wait time for transactions to be considered locked in from several seconds to just 150 milliseconds before the block is deemed final. Under the old system, votes were recorded as transactions on the blockchain, accumulating approvals across successive blocks.

Alpenglow simplifies this process by directly sending votes to each other and combining these approvals into certificates, enabling a block to become final after just one or two voting rounds. The transition from the old system took approximately 900 milliseconds, according to the Solana Foundation. Out of 654 participating validators, 446 certified the block used as the starting point, marking the shift between the systems.

Many Solana applications previously displayed transactions as confirmed before the network had fully locked them in, creating a sense of rapid payment confirmation with a slight delay for full settlement. Alpenglow aims to expedite these transactions, providing users with stronger assurance that their payments will be successfully settled.

This is particularly beneficial for services that require immediate fund release or goods delivery upon receiving payment. For example, an exchange could credit a deposit sooner, allowing a customer to trade with the funds immediately. A shop accepting a stablecoin payment could confirm the transaction without keeping the customer waiting at the counter for settlement.

It's important to note that the 150-millisecond figure represents a target under normal network conditions and may not guarantee the same speed for every payment. Users can still send funds using their existing wallets, with transaction fees and application operations remaining unaffected. The speed improvement arises from altering how validators, the computers responsible for checking transactions and agreeing on the network's records, communicate with each other.

Additionally, a noticeable change may be observed on network dashboards, where validator votes are no longer presented as blockchain transactions, potentially causing services that tracked these votes to report lower transaction totals. Therefore, when assessing user activity, it's crucial to distinguish between user transactions and the votes that previously filled the blocks.