Solana Activates Alpenglow Upgrade on Devnet

The Solana network has reached a major milestone as Alpenglow, a significant upgrade designed to improve finality and reduce latency, has gone live on its developer network (devnet). This upgrade is expected to shrink the current wait time for transactions to become irreversible from around 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds.

Alpenglow reworks how validators verify transactions, allowing them to send votes directly to each other rather than recording them as transactions within blocks. This change enables faster agreement on the network's recorded transactions and is expected to improve user experience, particularly for exchanges and payment apps.

The devnet step is a crucial phase for developers, who can now test their applications against the new behavior ahead of the live launch. However, data providers are advised to adjust their comparisons as the number of transactions will appear to decrease due to the elimination of validator votes from transaction counts.