Solana's Alpenglow Upgrade Aims for Near-Instant Transaction Finality

Solana has successfully migrated its developer network to Alpenglow, a major consensus upgrade designed to reduce transaction finality times from roughly 12.8 seconds to between 100 and 150 milliseconds.

The migration was completed on September 25, with the activation taking effect at epoch 1167 after a 17-minute countdown. The transition was carried out by Anza engineers, who develop core software for the Solana network.

Alpenglow is designed to change how validators coordinate across the blockchain and reduce the amount of block capacity consumed by consensus-related activity.

The upgrade involves replacing Solana's longstanding TowerBFT consensus mechanism with Votor, a new voting system developed by Anza engineers in collaboration with researchers from ETH Zurich. Validators approved the change under Solana Improvement Document SIMD-0326.