“Solana's Alpenglow Upgrade Set for Oct 21: Finality to Drop from 12.8s to 150ms” — what this page in the network covers. Solana has scheduled its next major network upgrade, Alpenglow, for October 21, marking a significant shift in how the blockchain reaches consensus. The upgrade will replace the current TowerBFT voting mechanism, which has been a core component since the network's early days, with a new system designed to dramatically speed up transaction finality. Currently, Solana's average finality time is around 12.8 seconds, but Alpenglow aims to reduce that to just 150 milliseconds—an improvement of nearly 99%.
This change is expected to make Solana one of the fastest finality blockchains in the industry, potentially rivaling centralized systems in responsiveness. A key technical change in Alpenglow is the removal of vote transactions from blocks entirely. Under the old model, validators' votes were included as transactions, consuming block space and adding overhead. For the complete material, the listing points back to the source inside the network.