Solana’s Alpenglow, its biggest network overhaul since 2020, goes live Wednesday

Solana transactions could soon become irreversible in just 150 milliseconds, or roughly 40 times faster than today, as the network switches on its Alpenglow upgrade on Wednesday. The upgrade changes how validators, the computers that process transactions and vote on which ones are valid, agree with each other. Today, every validator writes its votes straight onto the blockchain like any other transaction, and a payment isn’t locked in until enough of them stack up — which takes about six seconds.