Solana transactions could soon become irreversible in just 150 milliseconds, or roughly 40 times faster than today, as the network switches on its Alpenglow upgrade on Wednesday.
The upgrade changes how validators, the computers that process transactions and vote on which ones are valid, agree with each other. Today, every validator writes its votes straight onto the blockchain like any other transaction, and a payment isn’t locked in until enough of them stack up — which takes about six seconds.
Alpenglow pulls that voting off the chain and bundles votes into certificates that can lock in a transaction in one or two rounds. If the 150-millisecond target holds up on mainnet, a Solana transaction would be settled in less time than it takes to blink.
Six seconds is a long time in a fast market. Speed is Solana’s whole pitch, and it has become a home for memecoin trading, stablecoin payments and onchain exchanges trying to compete with centralized exchanges.
At six seconds, a price can move before a trade is locked in, and exchanges and payment apps make users wait before treating a deposit as done.
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