Overview
- The Alpenglow upgrade is active on Solana’s public devnet and testnet to let developers, validators and infrastructure providers test the new consensus flow.
- Under Alpenglow’s first phase, Votor, validators send votes directly to one another so a block can reach finality in one voting round if validators controlling about 80% of stake agree.
- Applications that only submit transactions and read balances need no migration, but explorers, block-data providers and some validator tools must update how they collect vote and candidate-block information.
- The roughly 150-millisecond finality figure is a testing target derived from simulations and has not been sustained in live-market conditions, and no firm mainnet activation date has been announced.
- Removing on-chain vote transactions will lower reported transaction totals and change metrics for services that track network activity, and exchanges and wallets will keep their own rules for when deposits or payments are treated as final.