Solana has run the Alpenglow upgrade on mainnet since October 21. The network targets finality in roughly 150 milliseconds, while an outside measurement put median observed finality at 404 milliseconds. Wallet signing and transaction fees stay the same, but data providers and validators have changes to make.
Solana has been running Alpenglow on mainnet since October 21, replacing a voting system that could take several seconds to finalize a block with one designed to finish in a fraction of a second. The Solana Foundation records the switch in epoch 1064, after 446 of 654 validators certified a genesis block.
The 150 milliseconds is a target, not a measurement
The Foundation uses 12.8 seconds as a reference for old finality and roughly 150 milliseconds as the new target. Those numbers describe a protocol comparison, not two measurements taken from the same wallet under identical conditions.
An outside measurement published October 23 put median finality at 404 milliseconds over its preceding 24 hours, with a 579 millisecond 90th percentile and a 765 millisecond 99th percentile. Its earlier reference was about seven seconds under TowerBFT. The methodology and observation point differ from the Foundation's baseline and design target.
What changes for users and developers
Ordinary users see little difference in how they pay. The Foundation's upgrade record says transaction formats, programs and fees did not change. Faster finality reaches customers only if wallets, exchanges and merchants update their own confirmation rules.
Developers who handle block streams have more work. Solana's updated data streams can expose more than one candidate bank for a slot, and Agave 4.3 tags events with a bank_id so clients can keep candidates separate. The change also removes vote transactions from blocks, so headline transaction counts can fall without fewer user payments.
Validators pay a new admission ticket
Voting previously cost about 1 SOL per epoch in transaction fees, paid from a validator's identity account. The new Validator Admission Ticket burns 0.8 SOL per epoch from its vote account, on top of the rent-exempt minimum. A validator that lacks enough SOL in the correct account cannot vote or produce blocks in the following epoch.
Votor, the voting system, is live, but Rotor, the planned block distribution replacement, has no activation date. Block distribution still uses the old Turbine approach.
Source: crypto.news
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