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Solana activates Alpenglow, targeting 150ms finality

Solana activated Alpenglow on Oct. 21, targeting 150-millisecond finality; wallets need no changes, while validators and data services face protocol shifts.

By Web3 Hub Newsroom2 min read

Solana activates Alpenglow, targeting 150ms finality

Solana activated its Alpenglow consensus upgrade on Oct. 21, replacing TowerBFT and targeting transaction finality in about 150 milliseconds, down from 12.8 seconds, according to the Solana Foundation’s Alpenglow announcement. The change affects how validators agree on blocks; transaction execution and fees remain the same.

The upgrade switched on at the start of epoch 1064, at about 13:36 UTC. The Block’s report on the mainnet activation said Anza described the change as condensing a two-step confirmation process into one for services such as exchanges crediting deposits and merchants processing payments.

What changes for Solana users?

Wallets and apps require no user action, and signing, sending and approving transactions work as before, the Solana Foundation says. Faster finality means a transaction should become irreversible sooner; the 150-millisecond figure is a target for finality, not the interval between blocks.

Alpenglow’s Votor protocol replaces validator vote transactions in blocks with direct votes between validators, bundled into certificates. A block becomes final after one or two voting rounds, according to the Foundation. As a result, vote transactions no longer appear in blocks, so transaction counts that included validator votes will fall even if user activity does not.

Which operators need to act, and what comes next?

Validators must run version 4.3.2 of Agave, Jito-Solana or Harmonic Salsa, and keep at least 0.8 SOL above the rent-exempt minimum in their vote account to pay the Validator Admission Ticket fee each epoch. Validators that miss the fee are excluded from voting and block production in the following epoch, the Foundation says.

Developers who read or stream block data may need to adapt: the Foundation says “confirmed” and “finalized” now describe the same state, and data services must account for changes to block and bank identifiers. The next planned phase, Rotor, would replace Turbine’s block propagation system, but the Foundation has not scheduled its release.

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