Solana Tests Alpenglow Upgrade Aiming for 150ms Finality

Solana’s Alpenglow consensus upgrade is being introduced on the blockchain’s public testnet, where developers and validators are expected to assess a design intended to reduce transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. The performance figure is a target, not a result demonstrated in public testing, and the exact status of activation remains unclear. Alpenglow is designed to replace TowerBFT, Solana’s current consensus system, with a voting protocol called Votor. Under TowerBFT, validators record votes on-chain and build toward finality across a sequence of slots. Votor would let validators exchange votes directly and combine them into certificates, allowing a block to be finalized after one or two voting rounds, depending on participation and network conditions. Finality is the point at which a transaction is treated as irreversible under the network’s consensus rules. Faster finality could give services such as exchanges, bridges and merchants an earlier settlement signal.