Solana’s Alpenglow Upgrade Goes Live, Could Slash Reported Transaction Counts

Solana has rolled out Alpenglow, described by developers and analysts as the blockchain's most significant upgrade to date. The change targets consensus, the mechanism validators use to agree on which transactions are valid and in what order they occurred. At the center of Alpenglow is a redesign of how validators vote on blocks. Previously, those votes were recorded as transactions directly on Solana's main chain. Under the new system, voting moves off-chain, removing a large share of activity that had been counted in the network's public transaction totals.