Alpenglow will replace the voting system Solana has used since 2020, targeting roughly 150-millisecond finality after months of testing that included a failed migration and rollback.
Alpenglow pulls that voting off the chain and bundles votes into certificates that can lock in a transaction in one or two rounds. If the 150-millisecond target holds up on mainnet, a Solana transaction would be settled in less time than it takes to blink.
Six seconds is a long time in a fast market, where a price can move before a trade is locked in, and exchanges and payment apps make users wait before treating a deposit as done.
But cutting that to a fraction of a second gets Solana much closer to the feel of a card payment or a trade on a centralized exchange (Ethereum, by comparison, takes roughly 13 minutes to reach full finality).
"Solana's transaction count is going to look a lot lower this week, and people will ask if something's wrong. It isn't,” shared Robin Nordnes, CEO and founder of Raiku, which builds trading infrastructure on Solana, in an email.. “Most of what got counted before was validators voting, and that's off-chain now. The trading's all still there.”
The test network was wiped and restarted from scratch six times since launching in early May, and one attempt to migrate to the new system failed network-wide and had to be rolled back, according to a post from Galaxy Digital, one of roughly 100 validator operators on the test network. A later migration went through, clearing the way for Wednesday’s launch.
The switch is set for the start of epoch 1064 on Wednesday, with the actual change at slot 459,653,000 after a 5,000-slot transition.