The Alpenglow upgrade, scheduled to go live on Solana on Wednesday, October 21, aims to cut transaction finality time from about six seconds to 150 milliseconds, reducing wait times for trading and payments.
According to CoinDesk, Alpenglow is being described as Solana’s most extensive network change since 2020. The upgrade changes how the computers that validate transactions reach agreement on which transactions are valid.
What will the 40x speed target change?
Under the current system, validators write their votes directly to the blockchain, like other transactions. It takes about six seconds for enough votes to accumulate for a transaction to reach finality. Alpenglow aims to complete this process in one or two rounds by collecting votes off-chain and combining them into certificates.
If the 150-millisecond target is met on mainnet, transaction finality will be about 40 times faster. In a fast-moving market, this could shorten the time during which prices might change while traders wait for their trades to finalize. It could also allow payment apps and on-chain exchanges to offer users shorter wait times.
Solana’s use for memecoin trading, stablecoin payments, and on-chain platforms competing with centralized exchanges increases the practical significance of this change. The goal is not just for a transaction to appear on screen, but for the network to recognize it as finalized sooner.
Validator voting costs will also fall
The upgrade replaces the approximately 2 SOL per day that validators on the network currently pay for voting transactions with a new participation fee. The fee, set at 0.8 SOL for each period of about 24 hours, represents approximately 60 percent savings on this cost.
This reduction applies to validators’ voting costs; no target has been announced for reducing all user transaction fees by the same amount.
What happened in testing before the mainnet transition?
According to Galaxy Digital, the testnet, which opened in early May, was reset and restarted six times. One attempt to transition to the new system was rolled back after failing across the network; a later transition was completed successfully. The disruptions occurred in a test environment where no real funds were used.
The plan is to begin the transition process on Wednesday at the start of epoch 1064, with the new system going live at slot number 459.653.000 after a 5,000-slot transition. A slot is the time interval the network sets aside to produce a block. The target speed’s performance on mainnet will become clear after this transition.
Not investment advice.