Solana launches Alpenglow upgrade, slashing transaction finality to 150 milliseconds

Solana's new Alpenglow consensus protocol went live on mainnet-beta at slot 459,653,000, replacing TowerBFT. Transactions now become irreversible in approximately 150 milliseconds, down from 12.8 seconds under the previous protocol. The upgrade was coordinated by independent validators and core developer Anza, condensing the confirmation and finality steps into a single step.