Solana's Alpenglow Upgrade Goes Live Today, Targeting 40x Faster Finality

Solana's Alpenglow upgrade goes live today, aiming to make transactions 40x faster and cutting validator costs by 60%. Solana is switching on its Alpenglow upgrade today. This is he biggest change to the network's consensus system since it launched in 2020. The upgrade targets transaction finality of about 150 milliseconds, set to activate at 14:00 UTC. Alpenglow will be replacing the old TowerBFT consensus mechanism. Before now, each validator would log its votes on the blockchain as a transaction. The payment could only be finalized once there were enough votes accumulated. This process took around 6 seconds to 12.8 seconds.