Solana’s Alpenglow launches on mainnet, targets 99% faster finality

Solana’s first major consensus upgrade is targeting 99% finality reduction, seeking to offer users near-immediate transaction settlement and more responsive applications. Solana’s first major consensus upgrade, Alpenglow, went live on mainnet around 1:54 pm UTC on Wednesday, according to the Solana Foundation’s Alpenglow dashboard . Alpenglow seeks to reduce transaction finality by 99%, to roughly 150 milliseconds from about 12.8 seconds, according to the Solana Foundation’s July announcement . The upgrade’s first phase, Votor, replaces the existing voting and finalization mechanism with direct validator voting and a certificate-based system designed to cut transaction finality to roughly 150 milliseconds.