Solana Sprints Towards Instant Finality with Alpenglow Upgrade

Solana is gearing up for a major upgrade called Alpenglow, which promises to slash transaction finality by nearly 99%.

This means that validators will only take around 150 milliseconds to reach strong agreement that a transaction cannot be reversed, down from the current 12.8 seconds.

The upgrade is expected to make Solana's network feel essentially instantaneous for merchants and consumers, according to developers.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko pointed out that finality is not as crucial in most cases, saying 'finality is really only important at the cash register.'

The Alpenglow upgrade will particularly benefit consumer-facing applications, such as point-of-sale payments and retail crypto transactions, where humans wait for confirmation before completing a transaction.