Solana Aims to Shave Seconds Off Transaction Times with Alpenglow Upgrade

The Solana blockchain is gearing up for a broader testing phase of its Alpenglow upgrade, which aims to significantly reduce transaction finality times. Currently, transactions take around 12.8 seconds to finalize, but with Alpenglow, this could be shortened to just 150 milliseconds.

Alpenglow replaces the existing TowerBFT system with a voting protocol called Votor, which allows validators' votes to be sent directly to one another, reducing consensus time to just one or two rounds. This upgrade will not require users to switch to different wallets, as it only affects how transactions are executed.

However, not all validator software is ready for the transition yet. Participating validators will need to use Agave 4.3, developed by Anza, while Jump Crypto's alternative validator software, Firedancer and Frankendancer, does not currently support Alpenglow. The initial transition attempt will be conducted using Agave.

As part of this upgrade, the network's finality time could be shortened for many transactions, including exchange deposits to payments. This could have significant implications for users who rely on these transactions, such as exchanges and cross-chain bridges.