Solana to Launch Its Largest Network Upgrade in 6 Years on Wednesday, Transaction Times Expected to Drop to 150 Milliseconds

BlockBeats news, October 21 - Solana will launch the Alpenglow upgrade on October 21, one of the largest underlying overhauls of the network since 2020. This upgrade will replace the existing validator voting mechanism, aiming to reduce transaction finality time from the current approximately 6 seconds to 150 milliseconds, a speed increase of about 40 times.

The core of the upgrade is to move validator voting from on-chain to off-chain and consolidate votes into certificates, enabling transactions to achieve finality in one to two rounds of consensus. If mainnet operation meets expectations, Solana's transaction confirmation speed will approach the experience of credit card payments or centralized trading platforms, helping to improve the user experience of meme coin trading, stablecoin payments, and on-chain trading platforms. This upgrade will also reduce validator costs.

Currently, validators need to pay approximately 2 SOL per day in voting fees. After the upgrade, voting fees will be eliminated and replaced by a fixed validator admission fee charged per epoch, with each approximately 24-hour epoch costing 0.8 SOL, expected to reduce costs by about 60%. However, the upgrade testing process has not been smooth. According to Galaxy Digital, since the test network launched in early May, the test network has been wiped and restarted from scratch 6 times, with one migration attempt causing the entire test network migration to fail and subsequently roll back. A later migration ultimately succeeded, paving the way for this mainnet launch.

All the above issues occurred in the test network and did not involve real fund risks. According to the announcement, the upgrade is scheduled to start at the beginning of epoch 1064 on Wednesday, and after a transition phase of 5000 slots, the switch will be completed at slot 459,653,000.