Solana Blockchain Upgrades to Alpenglow Protocol

Solana has successfully upgraded its blockchain to a new consensus protocol called Alpenglow. The upgrade aims to reduce transaction finality times from around 12.8 seconds to between 100 and 150 milliseconds.

The migration was completed on Solana's developer network, known as devnet, with the activation triggered at epoch 1167 after a 17-minute countdown. Alpenglow is now running on both devnet and testnet, but there is no confirmed date yet for mainnet-beta.

The new protocol uses a voting system called Votor, which was developed in collaboration with researchers from ETH Zurich. This system allows validators to exchange votes directly off-chain, reducing the time it takes for the network to reach agreement.