Solana Targets 150ms Latency with Alpenglow Upgrade
Solana is gearing up for a major upgrade called Alpenglow that promises to significantly improve finality on its blockchain, targeting a latency of around 150 milliseconds. This is a significant reduction from the current 12.8 seconds it takes for transactions to be confirmed under TowerBFT.
The Solana Foundation has announced that Alpenglow will activate with Agave 4.3 in October, replacing the existing TowerBFT consensus design. The upgrade includes several key changes, including the introduction of Votor and BLS signatures, which allow for more efficient voting and aggregation of validator votes.
The Solana Foundation has emphasized that finality is an important consideration, particularly for users who require stronger certainty that transactions will not be reversed. Anatoly Yakovenko, a co-founder of Solana, noted that finality is only critical in situations where users or merchants need to know with certainty whether a transaction will go through.