Solana’s 150-Millisecond Settlement Upgrade Moves to Second Public Testnet

Alpenglow is now operating on both of Solana’s public test networks, giving developers an environment to evaluate their applications before the upgrade is activated on the main blockchain.

Solana’s upcoming upgrade is designed to reduce transaction finality to a fraction of a second, allowing developers to test the changes before they are introduced to the network handling real-value transactions.

Known as Alpenglow, the upgrade aims to achieve finality in about 150 milliseconds, meaning transactions would become effectively irreversible much faster. The current Solana system takes roughly 12.8 seconds to reach the same point.

The shorter confirmation window could reduce the time exchanges need to make deposited funds available and allow payment applications to confirm completed purchases to merchants more quickly.

Anza, which develops Solana’s core software, announced the transition to the developer network on September 25, one day after the separate testnet completed its own upgrade. The Solana Foundation’s upgrade tracker now shows Alpenglow running on both public networks.

Developers use Solana’s devnet to test applications with tokens that have no monetary value. The separate testnet is primarily intended for testing network software and evaluating validator performance under demanding conditions.

Alpenglow also introduces changes to how validators reach agreement on the blockchain’s state. Instead of recording validator votes as transactions within blocks, validators will communicate those votes directly. This allows consensus to be reached in as little as one or two voting rounds.

The change could also affect certain Solana network activity metrics. Because validator votes will no longer be counted as transactions, reported transaction numbers could decline even if the number of user payments and trades remains unchanged. The Solana Foundation has advised data providers to modify their metrics and historical comparisons accordingly.

Systems that maintain blockchain transaction histories will also need to distinguish between competing candidate blocks until the network determines which one becomes canonical. Combining information from competing blocks could otherwise result in inaccurate records.

According to the Foundation’s documentation, applications that only submit transactions and retrieve account balances will not need to migrate as part of the upgrade.

The 150-millisecond figure remains a projected target based on simulations rather than a result demonstrated under live network conditions. Additional delays can also come from wallet processing, exchange deposit procedures, and other application-level checks.

Solana has not yet announced a definitive date for activating Alpenglow on the mainnet. Anza’s current software roadmap tentatively permits feature activations to resume on September 28, but that date has not been designated as the launch date for Alpenglow.

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