Solana’s first major consensus upgrade, Alpenglow, launched on the mainnet around 1:54 pm UTC on Wednesday. The upgrade aims to drastically reduce transaction finality by 99%, bringing it down to roughly 150 milliseconds from the current 12.8 seconds. This improvement is part of the first phase, Votor, which replaces the existing voting and finalization mechanism with a direct validator voting system and a certificate-based approach.
Alpenglow marks a significant shift for Solana, as it replaces the current consensus model, TowerBFT. The upgrade’s goal of achieving 150-millisecond finality could enable near-instant transaction confirmations, potentially enhancing payment speeds, trade settlements, and application responsiveness. At the time of the upgrade, the Solana mainnet showed a transaction finality of 6.6 seconds and a throughput of 4,721 transactions per second.
The upgrade has been described as the “biggest change to Solana’s core protocol” since its inception. Researchers from Anza highlighted that a 150-millisecond latency could make Solana competitive with Web2 infrastructure, opening up new application categories for blockchain technology. Following Alpenglow, validators are expected to work on Agave 4.5, an upgrade planned for December 2026 that aims to increase the number of accounts supported by a versioned transaction from 64 to 96.
The Solana (SOL) token saw a nearly 3% price increase in the 24 hours leading up to the upgrade, partially reversing a 42% decline over the past year.