Solana Soars on Alpenglow Upgrade and Record ETF Inflows

Solana's price has been rising in recent days due to two key factors: a major network upgrade called Alpenglow and record-breaking inflows into US Solana exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

The Alpenglow upgrade, developed by core engineering group Anza, replaces Solana's underlying consensus engine with a new protocol called Votor. This change cuts transaction finality from 12.8 seconds to around 150 milliseconds, making transactions faster and cheaper.

Traders have treated the upgrade as a fundamental catalyst for renewed trading activity. The code for Alpenglow has been inactive on mainnet since September 18, building expectation ahead of a formal switch, which is scheduled to begin on September 28.

In addition to speed improvements, the Alpenglow upgrade raises Solana's fault tolerance threshold from 33 percent to 40 percent of staked validators. This gives the network stronger protection against outages and hardware crashes.