Solana Tries to Cut Transaction Finality Time in Half

Solana's Alpenglow upgrade has moved to its public test network, where developers will try to reduce transaction finality from about 13 seconds to 0.15 seconds.

The testnet migration requires Agave 4.3 and will not support Firedancer or Frankendancer.

Alpenglow replaces Solana's TowerBFT consensus system with Votor, which allows validators to finalize blocks after one or two rounds of direct voting without changing how users send funds.

Currently, validators record their votes on the blockchain and stack enough of them across 32 slots before a block becomes final.