Solana Testnets Live with Alpenglow Upgrade
Solana has begun rolling out Alpenglow on its testnet environment, marking an important step in its blockchain consensus overhaul. The upgrade targets a finality of about 150 milliseconds, down from roughly 12.8 seconds under TowerBFT. Votor is the first phase of the rollout, which replaces vote transactions with direct votes between validators, reducing the wait for irreversible transactions by around 99%. Anza, developer behind Solana's Agave validator software, said testnet is entering the rollout process ahead of deployments on devnet and eventually mainnet-beta.
The migration requires adjustments from validators and infrastructure providers that stream blocks, track votes, or rely on Solana's existing commitment structure. Alpenglow will later add Rotor, a replacement for Turbine, but its focus remains on Votor and faster finality. This upgrade follows another wave of performance upgrades, including the activation of Transaction V1, which lifted maximum transaction size to 4,096 bytes.
Solana's SOL token has been experiencing growth alongside the network's technical push, trading around $117 as of press time after reaching almost $120 this week. This puts the token around its strongest level since late January, with a roughly 25% gain over the past month. Real-world assets on the Solana network reached about $4.6 billion in early September, and decentralized exchanges recorded more than 208 million individual spot trades in the week ending Sept. 13.
Kyle Samani of Multicoin Capital co-founded said he expects SOL's market capitalization to surpass Ethereum's during the current market cycle, citing recent lead over Ethereum in network fees. However, this gap remains substantial, with Solana near $58 billion against about $293 billion for ETH.