The Solana network is activating the Alpenglow upgrade today, 21 October, at epoch 1064. The change aims to cut transaction finality from about six seconds to around 150 milliseconds. Validator votes move off-chain into certificates, which is expected to reduce validators' operating costs by about 60%. During testing, the test network was restarted six times, once after a failed migration.

What it means: Finality is the point after which a transaction can no longer be reversed. For most payment and trading applications, it matters more than block time. Cutting it to a fraction of a second would bring Solana close to the speed of centralised payment systems and help use cases such as point-of-sale payments and high-frequency trading. Moving votes off-chain also changes the network's economics. Today validators pay significant fees to vote, which favours the larger ones. Lower costs could let more smaller validators take part, improving decentralisation. The risk is the transition itself: changing the consensus mechanism of a live network holding billions in value is one of the most demanding operations in the industry, and the testnet restarts show it is not simple. Solana has a history of outages in its early years, so the market will watch the first days closely. For users and developers, the real value will show once apps and exchanges adjust their own confirmation times.

Read the original on CoinDesk

Related service: Consulting

Related stories