Solana's Alpenglow reaches two public test networks

Solana's Alpenglow consensus upgrade is now active on both testnet and devnet, giving developers two public environments for testing before a future mainnet deployment. The design targets transaction finality of roughly 150 milliseconds, compared with about 12.8 seconds under the existing system.

Alpenglow changes how validators reach agreement, including moving validator votes out of normal block transactions. That will also reduce transaction counts in datasets that previously included those votes even if user activity is unchanged.

No mainnet activation date has been set, and the target finality has not yet been demonstrated under live-market conditions. The test-network milestone therefore validates deployment progress without establishing the production performance users will eventually see.