Solana Sets October 21 for Alpenglow Network Upgrade
Solana prepares to activate Alpenglow on mainnet, aiming to slash transaction finality from 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds.
Solana has scheduled the activation of its Alpenglow consensus upgrade for October 21 at approximately 15:00 UTC, according to Decrypt. The network will retire its current consensus mechanism in favor of a system designed to cut transaction finality from roughly 12.8 seconds down to a target of about 150 milliseconds, making it roughly 85 times faster.
Migration and New Consensus Mechanics
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Developed by core dev shop Anza after 18 months of work, the upgrade changes how validators cast votes. While validators previously submitted votes as transactions on the chain, Alpenglow enables them to vote directly to each other. As a result, Solana's headline transaction count and transaction-per-second (TPS) figures are expected to drop significantly because previous statistics largely reflected validator voting traffic rather than user activity.
Institutional Reliability and Resilience
The new consensus mechanism is built to maintain finality even if up to 20% of staked assets act maliciously and another 20% go offline, an improvement over the previous architecture that breaks if more than roughly one-third of staked SOL turns hostile. This resilience addresses historical concerns regarding network stability.
Key facts
- Activation Date: October 21, around 15:00 UTC on mainnet.
- Finality Target: Drops from 12.8 seconds to approximately 150 milliseconds.
- Developer: Built by core dev shop Anza over 18 months.
- Voting Change: Validators will vote directly to each other instead of on-chain.
Source: decrypt.co
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