Solana’s Alpenglow, its biggest network overhaul since 2020, goes live Wednesday
Source: CoinDesk ·
From the source
Alpenglow will replace the voting system Solana has used since 2020, targeting roughly 150-millisecond finality after months of testing that included a failed migration and rollback. Solana transactions could soon become irreversible in just 150 milliseconds, or roughly 40 times faster than today, as the network switches on its Alpenglow upgrade on Wednesday. The upgrade changes how validators, the computers that process transactions and vote on which ones are valid, agree with each other. Today, every validator writes its votes straight onto the blockchain like any other transaction, and a payment isn’t locked in until enough of them stack up — which takes about six seconds. Alpenglow pulls that voting off the chain and bundles votes into certificates that can lock in a transaction in one or two rounds. If the 150-millisecond target holds up on mainnet, a Solana transaction would be settled in less time than it takes to blink. Six seconds is a long time in a fast market. Speed is…