Solana's first major consensus upgrade, Alpenglow, went live on mainnet at around1:54 pm UTC on Wednesday, according to the Solana Foundation's Alpenglow dashboard.

Announced by the Solana Foundation in July, Alpenglow is designed to cut transaction finality by 99%, reducing it from roughly 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds. Transaction finality is the point at which a network treats a transaction as confirmed and irreversible, so the shorter the window, the sooner payments, trades and application activity can be considered settled.

The upgrade's first phase, Votor, replaces the network's existing voting and finalization mechanism with direct validator voting and a certificate-based system built to bring transaction finality down to roughly 150 milliseconds. A later phase will introduce Rotor, a new block data-distribution protocol intended to replace Turbine.

Alpenglow replaces Solana's current consensus model, TowerBFT — the mechanism by which the network's validators agree on the ledger's state — and marks the network's first major consensus upgrade. Its 150-millisecond finality target aims to deliver near-immediate transaction finality for users, potentially enabling faster payments, quicker trade settlements and more responsive applications.

At press time, the Solana mainnet showed a 6.6-second transaction finality and a throughput of 4,721 transactions per second, according to the Alpenglow dashboard, meaning the network still sits above the upgrade's 150-millisecond target while the phased rollout continues.

Cointelegraph has approached the Solana Foundation for comment on Alpenglow's finality measurements in testnet environments and its expected performance in real-world applications.

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Alpenglow marks the "biggest change" to Solana's core protocol: Anza

Alpenglow will introduce the "biggest change to Solana's core protocol" since genesis, Anza researchers wrote in a May blog post.

With 150-millisecond latency, "Solana can compete with Web2 infrastructure in terms of responsiveness, potentially making blockchain technology viable for entirely new categories of applications," wrote Anza researchers Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski and Roger Wattenhofer on May 19.

In August, Solana reduced its slot time for the first time since genesis as part of the Solana Foundation's plan to halve slot times to 200 milliseconds, a move the foundation argued would improve latency and accelerate confirmations across the network. The fourth stage of the slot reduction plan was completed in October.

Following Alpenglow, Solana validators are expected to continue working on Agave 4.5, an upgrade that proposes increasing the number of accounts supported by a versioned transaction from 64 to 96. According to the Solana Foundation, the increase could create better swap routes and execution prices. The upgrade is currently in development and planned for December 2026, making it the next scheduled step in the network's upgrade sequence.

The Solana (SOL) token's price rose nearly 3% in the 24 hours leading up to the upgrade, reversing part of its 42% decline over the past year, according to CoinMarketCap.

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Source: Cointelegraph