Solana launches Alpenglow mainnet upgrade, targeting 99% faster transaction finality

Solana's first major consensus upgrade, Alpenglow, launched on mainnet on October 21. The upgrade replaces the existing voting mechanism with direct validator voting and a certificate-based system, reducing transaction finality from approximately 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. It also introduces a new block data-distribution protocol to replace Turbine.