Solana Activates Alpenglow Upgrade on Mainnet

Solana activated its Alpenglow consensus upgrade on mainnet on October 21, introducing a new validator-voting system designed to reduce transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to a target of roughly 150 milliseconds. The upgrade’s activation was recorded on the Solana Foundation’s Alpenglow dashboard at about 1:54 p.m. UTC. The target represents an approximately 99% reduction in finality time, but early dashboard readings showed the network finalizing transactions in about 6.6 seconds, well above the stated goal. The dashboard also showed throughput of roughly 4,721 transactions per second at the time of reporting. Those figures are early mainnet readings, not evidence that the target has been reached consistently. The extent to which finality will approach 150 milliseconds under ordinary network conditions remains to be seen. Alpenglow’s first phase, called Votor, changes how validators reach agreement on transactions. Under the previous TowerBFT system, validator votes were recorded on the blockchain. Votor instead enables direct voting among validators and uses certificates to establish finality, a design intended to reach agreement in fewer rounds. Moving validator...