Solana's Alpenglow Upgrade Targets 150ms Finality, DigiTap Offers Early Payments Opportunity

Solana is pushing the boundaries of blockchain transaction speed with its Alpenglow upgrade. Currently running on public test networks, the update aims to reduce finality from around 12.8 seconds to just 150 milliseconds. This would allow merchants and exchanges to confirm transactions in near real-time, mirroring the instantaneous experience consumers expect.

The upgrade replaces Solana's existing TowerBFT consensus mechanism with Votor, which enables validators to communicate votes directly and finalize blocks after one or two voting rounds. Alpenglow is still in development according to the Solana Foundation, but it has already shown promising results on test networks.

DigiTap, a project built on top of Solana's infrastructure, offers a live beta app with wallet and card functionality available for download. With more than 10,000 cards issued before Token Generation Event (TGE), DigiTap is giving retail buyers an early opportunity to participate in the payments market at a price of $0.0589.