Solana's Alpenglow Upgrade Reduces Transaction Finality Time to Sub-Second

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has announced that the blockchain's next major upgrade is ready for testing, but not yet ready for public use. The new Alpenglow consensus protocol reduces transaction finality time from ~12.8 seconds to 100-150 milliseconds.

The update replaces TowerBFT with Votor, a voting system developed in collaboration with ETH Zurich researchers and approved by validators under SIMD-0326. This innovation moves validator coordination off-chain.

Until now, technical vote transactions took up as much as 75% of Solana's block capacity. Now, these transactions are aggregated into compact cryptographic BLS certificates, freeing up network capacity for user transactions and lowering costs for node operators.