Solana upgrade reaches second public test network ahead of live rollout

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Solana upgrade hits testnet

Highlights

Anza announced Alpenglow is live on Solana's developer network and testnet, aiming to reduce finality to 150 milliseconds from 12.8 seconds.
Alpenglow will change validator voting by enabling direct vote exchanges, reducing transaction counts that previously included validator votes regardless of user activity.
Solana Foundation advised data providers and services to adapt to new transaction counting and block selection protocols, as the 150-millisecond finality remains unproven on mainnet.

Testing rollout and settlement target

As reported by CoinDesk, Anza announced on Sept. 25 that Alpenglow is now live on Solana's developer network, a day after the separate testnet completed its own transition. The Solana Foundation's upgrade page also lists the upgrade as active on both public test networks.

Alpenglow is designed to reduce finality, the point at which a transaction can no longer be reversed, to about 150 milliseconds from roughly 12.8 seconds under the current system. A faster settlement window could reduce delays for exchanges releasing deposited funds and for payment applications confirming that a merchant sale is complete.

Developers use devnet to test applications with tokens that have no real value, while testnet is mainly used to stress-test network software and validator operations. No firm launch date has been announced for the live network, although Anza's software schedule tentatively allows feature activations to resume on Sept. 28 and does not identify that date as Alpenglow's launch.

Infrastructure and data impact

Alpenglow changes the way validators, the computers that verify transactions, reach agreement on the network's records. Instead of writing validator votes as transactions inside blocks, validators exchange votes directly, allowing agreement to take one or two voting rounds.

That design change is also expected to affect how Solana activity is measured. Transaction totals that include validator votes are set to decline even if user payment and trading activity remains unchanged, and the Foundation has told data providers to adjust their comparisons.

Services that compile transaction histories also need to keep rival candidate blocks separate until the network chooses one, because mixing their contents could create an inaccurate record. The Foundation's guide says applications that only submit transactions and read account balances do not need to migrate, while the 150-millisecond figure remains a simulation-based target rather than a result proven under live-market conditions.

Our earlier report on institutional investors’ growing dependence on trusted, timely market data explained how automation and a more complex market structure are increasing demand for empirical, transaction-based datasets. We noted that near-real-time information tied to actual trading and settlement workflows is becoming essential for liquidity analysis, risk management, and faster responses to macro or geopolitical shocks.

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