Solana Activates Major Upgrade Targeting 150-Millisecond Transaction Finality

Solana replaced its core voting system on Wednesday with Alpenglow, an upgrade that targets transaction finality in about 150 milliseconds instead of 12.8 seconds. Anza, the core engineering team that built Alpenglow, said validators retired TowerBFT at slot 459,653,000, at about 14:00 UTC that day. TowerBFT had run Solana since its launch in March 2020. That switch happened on the live network, with the existing ledger carried forward. Finality is the point at which a transaction can no longer be reversed. It is the moment exchanges, banks and merchants wait for before they treat an asset as moved.