Solana’s Alpenglow, its biggest network overhaul since 2020, goes live Wednesday
Summary
Solana is set to activate its Alpenglow upgrade on Wednesday, replacing on-chain validator votes with certificates intended to make transactions final in about 150 milliseconds, down from roughly six seconds. Faster finality could benefit trading and payments by reducing delays before transactions are treated as settled. The upgrade also replaces vote fees—about 2 SOL per day for validators—with a 0.8 SOL-per-epoch admission charge, roughly 60% cheaper. Testing involved six network restarts and a failed migration that was rolled back; a later migration succeeded. The switch is scheduled for epoch 1064.
