Solana Alpenglow Live on Testnet at 150ms Finality

Anza, a core developer for the Solana blockchain, announced on Monday that its Alpenglow consensus upgrade is now live on a community test cluster, marking a major step toward dramatically faster transaction finality.

The upgrade, tested with a limited set of validators, reduced the time for transactions to reach finality from Solana's current average of 12.8 seconds to under 150 milliseconds, according to early results. Finality refers to the point at which a transaction becomes irreversible, a critical metric for applications in trading, payments, and gaming. Anza described the launch as the biggest consensus change in Solana's history and invited more external validator operators to join the cluster for broader testing.

Alpenglow replaces key elements of Solana's existing system, including TowerBFT and Proof of History, with new components such as Votor, a streamlined offchain voting layer, and Rotor, a block propagation engine. These changes eliminate onchain vote transactions, which currently consume about 75 percent of block space, freeing capacity for user activity. The upgrade also introduces a Validator Admission Ticket requiring a 1.6 SOL fee per epoch to join the...