Solana Activates Alpenglow, Targeting 150-Millisecond Finality

Solana activated its Alpenglow upgrade on mainnet Wednesday, Oct. 21, replacing TowerBFT with a consensus system targeting transaction finality in about 150 milliseconds, down from about 12.8 seconds.

The 150-millisecond figure is a target, not a measured or guaranteed time for every transaction. Finality is the point at which a transaction is treated as irreversible. The shorter wait could let merchants release goods and exchanges credit deposits sooner, although each service controls when it acts on a payment.

Existing wallets and apps keep working, and transaction execution and fees remain unchanged. Regular users do not need to take action. Under Alpenglow, validators send votes directly to one another and bundle them into certificates. Those votes no longer appear as blockchain transactions, which could lower dashboard counts without a corresponding decline in user activity.

The live release is Alpenglow’s Votor phase. A second phase, Rotor, is planned to change how block data spreads across the network, but it has no scheduled date.