Solana Activates Alpenglow and Cuts Finality to 150 ms
The upgrade is meant to make transactions on the Solana main chain final in about 150 milliseconds. Validator costs are also set to drop after a testnet run that hit several snags.
Key Takeaways
- Solana is activating Alpenglow on Wednesday, a network update that is supposed to speed up finality from about six seconds to around 150 milliseconds.
- The update moves the validator voting process off-chain and into certificates, so transactions can be finalized in one or two rounds.
- Validators will soon pay 0.8 SOL per epoch for admission tickets, about 60% less than the current vote fees.
Solana is turning on Alpenglow on Wednesday, a major network update that is supposed to make transactions final much faster. The upgrade should cut the time to finality to about 150 milliseconds, compared with the current roughly six seconds. That brings Solana closer to the speed of a card payment or a trade on a crypto exchange.
What Alpenglow Changes
The core of the update is the validator voting process. Until now, validators have put their votes directly on-chain, just like regular transactions, and it takes a while before enough votes are collected to lock in a payment. Alpenglow takes that voting process off-chain and bundles the votes into certificates, so a transaction can be finalized in one or two rounds.
According to the upgrade description, that means a Solana transaction can become final in less time than it takes to blink. The update is meant to make the main chain faster and more efficient, without users having to change anything themselves.
Validator Costs Are Going Down
Costs are changing for validators too. They currently pay about 2 SOL per day in vote fees, a figure that recently came in higher after Solana shortened slot times to about 200 milliseconds. Alpenglow replaces those fees with a validator admission ticket of 0.8 SOL per epoch, a period of about 24 hours. That is roughly 60% cheaper.
The update also matters because Solana has long been known as a fast chain for memecoin trading, stablecoin payments, and onchain blockchain. Faster finality can be especially important in markets where prices move quickly and users do not want to wait long for a deposit or trade to count as complete. It is also relevant for institutional settlement: the Solana Foundation recently launched a DvP program for settlement that is supposed to let trades settle atomically on-chain.
Testnet Had Some Hiccups
The road to launch was not smooth. The testnet was wiped and restarted six times since early May, and one migration to the new system failed across the network and had to be rolled back. Later, the migration did work, after which the rollout could be set up for Wednesday.
Those test issues did not affect real money, because they happened on a network that is specifically meant to catch this kind of problem. The switch is scheduled for the start of epoch 1064, with the actual changeover at slot 459,653,000 after a transition of 5,000 slots.
