Solana Prepares Alpenglow Upgrade to Cut Transaction Finality Times
Solana is preparing to roll out its Alpenglow upgrade, which aims to significantly reduce transaction finality times. The upgrade has already been tested on both of Solana's public test networks and is now live on the developer network.
The current system takes around 12.8 seconds for transactions to be finalized, but Alpenglow hopes to bring this down to a mere 150 milliseconds. This change will affect how validators verify transactions, with direct vote exchanges replacing the previous method of writing validator votes as transactions inside blocks.
As a result, transaction counts that include validator votes are expected to decrease even if user payment and trading activity remains unchanged. Data providers and services have been advised by the Solana Foundation to adapt to new transaction counting and block selection protocols.