Solana is introducing “Alpenglow,” a new upgrade that aims to reduce block finality to just 150 milliseconds. Known for its speed and scalability, Solana could set new records with this proposal.
By bringing Solana’s performance up to speed with the fastest internet infrastructure, this leap will pave the way for a whole new class of real-time apps and confirm the network’s goal of being the blockchain for Web2-level responsiveness.
Solana Blockchain Speed Boost
Today, Solana’s blockchain finalizes transactions in around 12.8 seconds. With Alpenglow, that duration could drop by nearly 100-fold to as little as 150 milliseconds. This is instantaneous for digital systems, an ultra-fast that finality puts Solana ahead of almost every other layer-1 blockchain and even the world’s leading payment networks. For context, Visa typically processes payments in approximately 200 milliseconds, while a Google search takes a similar amount of time.
The upgrade is the result of relentless innovation by Solana Labs and its spinout, Anza, whose researchers developed Alpenglow specifically to break previous barriers imposed by the Proof-of-History (PoH) and TowerBFT consensus mechanisms.
This isn’t a mere tweak but a foundational overhaul, one that the Solana validator community is enthusiastically endorsing in live governance votes, with over 99% support at the time of writing.
While shaving finality down to just 150 milliseconds, Alpenglow retains Solana’s core values of decentralization and adversarial security. The protocols aim to tolerate up to 20% adversarial stake and an additional 20% offline validator participation, making it robust enough for institutional-scale deployments.
Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade may represent a turning point where blockchain technology meets the performance standards of mainstream web infrastructure. If successful, Solana could become the go-to platform for latency-sensitive applications and set a benchmark for future network upgrades across the industry
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