Alpenglow could allow exchanges, bridges and merchants to treat transactions as irreversible almost instantly.
Solana’s planned performance upgrade has reached the testnet stage, with developers aiming to reduce the time required for a transaction to reach finality from roughly 13 seconds to just 0.15 seconds.
Finality is the point at which a transaction is considered irreversible. Exchanges typically wait for finality before crediting deposits, while bridges rely on it before releasing funds on another blockchain. Merchants also use finality as confirmation that a payment can no longer be reversed.
Known as Alpenglow, the upgrade is now being deployed on Solana’s public testnet. The network is a replica of the blockchain that uses tokens without real monetary value, allowing developers to test the upgrade, identify potential issues and restart the network without putting user funds at risk.
Solana currently relies on TowerBFT for consensus, the mechanism validators use to agree on which transactions become part of the blockchain’s permanent record. Validators publish votes onchain and accumulate sufficient votes over 32 slots before a block reaches finality.
Alpenglow would replace TowerBFT with a new voting protocol called Votor. Under the proposed system, validators communicate their votes directly with one another and could finalize a block after one or two rounds, eliminating the lengthy sequence of onchain votes.
For users and applications, the change should be largely seamless. Transactions will continue to be processed in the same way, meaning users would not need new wallets or different methods of sending funds.
Alpenglow has already operated for more than four months on a smaller network built specifically for testing the upgrade. Its move to Solana’s established public testnet is designed to determine whether the larger collection of computers and services supporting the blockchain can migrate successfully as a group.
Validators participating in the test must run Agave 4.3, the primary software client used to operate Solana. Agave is maintained by Anza, one of the companies involved in developing the network.
Anza recommended Agave 4.3 to Solana mainnet validators on Sept. 21 after gradually deploying the software to operators representing 10% and then 25% of the SOL securing the network.
Two alternative validator clients, Firedancer and Frankendancer, developed by Jump Crypto, do not yet support the Alpenglow test.
These alternative clients are designed to reduce Solana’s dependence on a single software implementation, limiting the risk that a problem with Agave could affect the entire validator network simultaneously. Because they are not included in the current test, the initial Alpenglow migration will rely exclusively on Agave.
Anza’s schedule lists Sept. 28 as a tentative date for activating features contained in Agave 4.3 on Solana’s mainnet. That date should not be interpreted as a confirmed Alpenglow launch. As of early Wednesday, Anza’s tracker continued to show the testnet activation as pending.
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