Solana did something big today: Alpenglow officially activated on mainnet in epoch 1064, replacing TowerBFT with Votor in the consensus layer. Transaction finality has been cut from 12.8 seconds to a target of 150 milliseconds—about 85 times faster. Validator votes are no longer written to blocks, but instead aggregated off-chain, bringing voting fees down from around 2 SOL per day to 0.8 SOL per epoch. Governance proposal SIMD-0326 passed overwhelmingly last September with 98.27% approval, and the testnet median even reached 54 milliseconds. This isn’t an incremental optimization—it brings the settlement layer’s experience close to that of a centralized exchange. Whether mainnet can reliably hold 150 milliseconds is the only thing to watch next.$SOL #Solana #Alpenglow #Layer1Upgrade