Solana's Alpenglow Upgrade Accelerates Towards Mainnet Activation

Solana's long-awaited Alpenglow upgrade has reached a major milestone as it moves to the public testnet, bringing the network closer to a potentially transformative performance boost.

The upgrade aims to replace TowerBFT with a new voting protocol called Votor, which would allow validators to communicate their votes with each other and reach agreement within one or two rounds, rather than casting votes directly on-chain as in the current setup.

Developers are targeting finality of around 150 milliseconds, a significant reduction from Solana's current 12.8-second level. This would represent a major acceleration for the network, with transactions reaching finality approximately 85 times faster.

SOL has already shown signs of renewed momentum as the Alpenglow upgrade approaches its testing milestone, climbing sharply from around $98 in mid-September to roughly $118.41 as of press time, up about 19% over the period.