Solana’s faster finality is live. What changes for users?

Solana has been running Alpenglow on mainnet since October 21, replacing a voting system that could take several seconds to finalize a block with one designed to finish in a fraction of a second. The Solana Foundation records the switch in epoch 1064, after 446 of 654 validators certified a genesis block. Alpenglow began finalizing mainnet blocks at slot 459,653,000 on October 21, after the network certified its handoff block. Solana describes 150 milliseconds as a finality target; an October 23 outside measurement put median observed finality at 404 milliseconds.