Solana Alpenglow upgrade goes live today, with transaction finality time expected to drop from approximately 6 seconds to 150 milliseconds.

On October 21, according to CoinDesk, Solana's largest network upgrade since 2020, Alpenglow, will go live on the mainnet this Wednesday. The upgrade moves validator voting off-chain, bundles votes into certificates, and locks transactions within one to two rounds, aiming to shorten transaction finality time from approximately 6 seconds to around 150 milliseconds, increasing speed by roughly 40 times. For comparison, full finality on Ethereum takes about 13 minutes.

Following the upgrade, validators will no longer pay per-transaction voting fees (currently costing around 2 SOL per day), switching instead to a fixed admission fee of 0.8 SOL per epoch (approximately 24 hours), known as the validator admission ticket, which reduces costs by about 60%. Since voting will now be handled off-chain, Solana's on-chain transaction count is expected to decrease significantly, but Raiku CEO Robin Nordnes clarified that this does not signal any abnormalities with the network.