Solana to Launch Alpenglow Upgrade, Targeting 150-Millisecond Transaction Finality

Odaily reports: Solana will launch its major network upgrade Alpenglow on Wednesday, one of its largest network architecture upgrades since 2020. The upgrade will replace the existing system with a new validator voting mechanism, using off-chain voting and certificate mechanisms to shorten the target transaction finality time to approximately 150 milliseconds—roughly a 40x improvement over the current ~6 seconds.

Alpenglow will also eliminate per-vote on-chain voting fees for validators, replacing them with a fixed admission fee of 0.8 SOL per Epoch, which is expected to reduce related costs by approximately 60%. The upgrade previously underwent multiple testnet restarts and was once rolled back due to a migration failure; after a subsequent successful migration, it paved the way for the official launch. The switch is scheduled to begin at Epoch 1064 and will be completed after a transition of 5,000 slots. (CoinDesk)