Solana's Alpenglow Upgrade Targets 150ms Finality, Could Spark Major Growth

Solana is moving closer to a major performance boost as its Alpenglow upgrade targets a significant reduction in transaction finality. The upgrade, which has moved to public testnet, aims to replace TowerBFT with a new Votor voting protocol, cutting the time it takes for transactions to reach finality from 12.8 seconds to around 150 milliseconds.

The current setup relies on validators casting votes on-chain and accumulating confirmations across 32 slots before a block reaches finality. Alpenglow will eliminate this lengthy sequence of on-chain voting, allowing validators to communicate their votes with each other and potentially reaching agreement within one or two rounds.

Developers are targeting finality of around 150 milliseconds, representing a dramatic acceleration for the network. If Alpenglow delivers the performance developers anticipate, transactions could reach finality approximately 85 times faster.