Solana’s Alpenglow Goes Live on Mainnet, Aiming for 99% Faster Finality

Solana’s first major consensus upgrade, Alpenglow, went live on mainnet around 1:54 pm UTC on Wednesday, based on the Solana Foundation’s upgrade dashboard. It replaces the current TowerBFT consensus model and aims to cut transaction finality by 99%, from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. At the time of reporting, the dashboard showed mainnet finality of 6.6 seconds and throughput of 4,721 transactions per second.

How the Upgrade Works in Phases

The first phase, called Votor, swaps the existing voting and finalization system for direct validator voting and a certificate based process. A later phase will bring Rotor, a new block data distribution protocol meant to replace Turbine. Faster finality could mean quicker payments, trade settlements and more responsive applications.

Anza Calls It the Biggest Protocol Change

Anza researchers Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski and Roger Wattenhofer wrote in May that Alpenglow is the biggest change to Solana’s core protocol since genesis. They said a 150 millisecond latency could let Solana compete with traditional web infrastructure on responsiveness and open the door to entirely new kinds of applications.

Slot Time Cuts and What Comes Next

In August, Solana reduced its slot time for the first time since genesis as part of a plan to halve slot times to 200 milliseconds, and it finished the fourth stage of that plan in October. Validators will next work on Agave 4.5, which proposes raising the number of accounts in a versioned transaction from 64 to 96. That could improve swap routes and execution prices, and it is planned for December 2026.

The SOL token rose nearly 3.1% in the 24 hours before the upgrade, recovering part of its 42% decline over the past year.