Solana's Alpenglow Goes Live on Mainnet, Aiming to Cut Transaction Finality Time by 99%

Odaily reports that Solana's first major consensus upgrade, Alpenglow, went live on mainnet around 13:54 UTC on Wednesday. The upgrade aims to reduce transaction finality time from approximately 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds, a reduction of roughly 99%.

In the first phase of the upgrade, Votor will replace the existing voting and finality confirmation mechanism with direct validator voting and a certificate-based system; subsequent phases will introduce the Rotor block data dissemination protocol, replacing Turbine. At the time the upgrade launched, Solana mainnet transaction finality was 6.6 seconds, with throughput of 4,721 transactions per second.

Alpenglow will replace Solana's existing TowerBFT consensus model. Validators are expected to continue developing Agave 4.5, an upgrade plan that would increase the number of accounts supported by versioned transactions from 64 to 96, currently scheduled for launch in December 2026. (Cointelegraph)