Solana to Launch Its Largest Network Upgrade in 6 Years on Wednesday, Transaction Times Expected to Drop to 150 Milliseconds

October 21 — Solana will launch the Alpenglow upgrade on October 21, one of the largest underlying overhauls of the network since 2020. The upgrade will replace the existing validator voting mechanism, aiming to reduce transaction finality time from the current approximately 6 seconds to 150 milliseconds, a speed increase of about 40x.

The core of the upgrade is to move validator voting from on-chain to off-chain and consolidate votes into certificates, enabling transactions to achieve finality within one to two rounds of consensus. If mainnet operation meets expectations, Solana's transaction confirmation speed will approach the experience of credit card payments or centralized trading platforms, helping to improve the user experience of meme coin trading, stablecoin payments, and on-chain trading platforms. The upgrade will also reduce validator costs.

Currently, validators need to pay approximately 2 SOL per day in voting fees. After the upgrade, voting fees will be eliminated and replaced by a fixed validator admission fee charged per epoch, with each approximately 24-hour epoch costing 0.8 SOL, an expected cost reduction of about 60%. However, the upgrade testing process has not been smooth. According to Galaxy Digital, since the test network launched in early May, the test network has been wiped and restarted from scratch 6 times, including one migration attempt that caused the entire test network migration to fail and was subsequently rolled back. A later migration ultimately succeeded, paving the way for this mainnet launch.

All the above issues occurred on the test network and did not involve real fund risk. According to the announcement, the upgrade is scheduled to start at the beginning of epoch 1064 on Wednesday and complete the switch at slot 459,653,000 after a transition period of 5,000 slots.