Solana’s biggest network change since 2020 is live. Here’s how users benefit

Solana switched on its Alpenglow upgrade Wednesday, introducing a new voting system designed to make payments and trades final in a fraction of a second. The upgrade targets about 150 milliseconds before the network considers a transaction locked in, replacing the multi-second wait under its previous system. That point is called finality, when an application can treat the payment as settled. Previously, they recorded votes as transactions on the blockchain and accumulated approvals across successive blocks.