Alpenglow would let exchanges, bridges and merchants treat payments as irreversible almost immediately.

  • Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade has moved to its public test network, where developers will test reducing transaction finality from about 13 seconds to 0.15 seconds.
  • Alpenglow replaces Solana’s TowerBFT consensus system with Votor, which allows validators to finalize blocks after one or two rounds of direct voting without changing how users send funds.
  • The initial testnet migration requires Agave 4.3 and will not support Firedancer or Frankendancer, while a Sept. 28 mainnet update remains tentative and is not a confirmed Alpenglow launch date.

A planned upgrade to make Solana even faster has moved to a testnet, where developers will try to cut the time a payment takes to become irreversible from about 13 seconds to 0.15 seconds.

That moment is known as finality. Exchanges wait for it before crediting deposits, bridges wait before releasing money on another blockchain and merchants need it to know that a payment cannot be taken back.

The upgrade, called Alpenglow, is now being introduced on Solana’s public test network, a copy of the blockchain that uses tokens with no monetary value. Developers can test the migration, find problems and restart the network without putting users’ money at risk.

Solana currently uses a system called TowerBFT to reach consensus, the process through which validators agree on which transactions belong in the permanent record. Validators record their votes on the blockchain and stack enough of them across 32 slots before a block becomes final.

Alpenglow replaces that system with a voting protocol called Votor. Validators send votes directly to one another and can settle on a block after one or two rounds, removing the long chain of onchain votes.

Applications keep executing transactions as they do today, and users will not need to change wallets or how they send funds.

Alpenglow has spent more than four months running on a smaller network created specifically for the upgrade. Moving it to Solana’s established testnet checks whether the broader group of computers and services already running the blockchain can switch together.

Validators taking part need Agave 4.3. Agave is the main software used to run Solana and is maintained by Anza, one of the companies responsible for developing the network.

Anza recommended Agave 4.3 to all mainnet validators on Sept. 21 after first rolling it out to operators responsible for 10% and then 25% of the SOL used to secure the network.

Firedancer and Frankendancer, two alternative validator programs built by Jump Crypto, do not yet support the Alpenglow test.

Those alternatives are intended to reduce Solana’s reliance on a single piece of software, so a fault in Agave does not affect every validator at once. Their absence from the test means the first Alpenglow migration will run entirely through Agave.

Sept. 28 appears in Anza’s schedule as the tentative date for turning on features included in Agave 4.3 on the main network. It is not a confirmed Alpenglow launch date, and Anza’s tracker still listed the testnet switch itself as pending early Wednesday.

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