Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade is now running across both of its public testing networks, allowing developers to evaluate their applications before the technology is deployed on the live blockchain.
The upgrade is designed to significantly reduce the time required for Solana transactions to reach finality. Developers can now test the changes in public environments before Alpenglow is introduced to the network that processes real-value transactions.
Alpenglow targets transaction finality of around 150 milliseconds, compared with approximately 12.8 seconds under Solana’s current system. Finality refers to the point at which a transaction is considered irreversible on the network.
If achieved, the faster finality could allow exchanges to make deposited assets available sooner and enable payment applications to confirm transactions to merchants with less delay.
Anza, the company responsible for Solana’s core software development, announced the devnet activation on September 25. The announcement followed the separate testnet’s transition one day earlier. The Solana Foundation’s upgrade tracker now lists Alpenglow as active on both public testing networks.
Solana’s devnet allows developers to test applications using tokens without real-world monetary value. Its separate testnet is primarily used to evaluate network software and put validator infrastructure through performance and stress tests.
The upgrade also changes how Solana validators reach consensus. Validators will communicate their votes directly rather than recording those votes as transactions within blocks. Under the new mechanism, network agreement could be reached after one or two rounds of voting.
This change is expected to affect some of the network’s transaction statistics. Since validator votes will no longer appear as transactions, reported transaction counts could decline even if users continue making the same number of payments and trades. The Solana Foundation has advised data providers to account for the change when comparing activity across different periods.
Blockchain data services will also need to ensure that transactions from competing candidate blocks remain separated until the network determines which block becomes canonical. Combining data from multiple candidate blocks could create inaccurate transaction histories.
For applications that only submit transactions and retrieve account balances, the Foundation’s guidance indicates that no migration will be required.
The 150-millisecond finality figure remains a target based on simulations rather than a confirmed performance level on a live network. Actual user experience could also depend on additional processing by wallets, exchanges, and other applications, which may introduce extra delays.
A specific mainnet activation date for Alpenglow has not been announced. Anza’s software roadmap currently indicates that feature activations could resume on September 28, but that date does not represent a confirmed Alpenglow launch.
