Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade is now available on both of the network’s public testing environments, allowing developers to assess their applications before the changes are deployed to the live blockchain.

The upgrade is designed to accelerate transaction finality substantially. Alpenglow is targeting finality in approximately 150 milliseconds, a major reduction from the roughly 12.8 seconds required by Solana’s current system. Finality is reached when a transaction is considered irreversible.

If the target is achieved, the faster process could help exchanges make deposited funds available more quickly and allow payment platforms to notify merchants that transactions have been completed with less delay.

Anza, the firm responsible for developing Solana’s core software, announced the devnet activation on September 25. The update followed the separate testnet transition completed on September 24. The Solana Foundation’s upgrade tracker now shows Alpenglow active on both public test networks.

The devnet is mainly used by application developers and relies on tokens that have no real monetary value. The separate testnet is focused more heavily on testing network software, validator operations, and performance under stress.

Alpenglow also introduces a different approach to validator consensus. Rather than including validator votes as transactions in blocks, validators will exchange their votes directly. The new process is designed to reach network agreement in one or two voting rounds.

The change could affect commonly cited Solana activity statistics. Because validator votes will no longer be recorded as transactions, overall transaction counts could decrease even if users continue making the same number of payments and trades. The Solana Foundation has advised data providers to adjust their metrics to reflect the change.

Blockchain data and indexing platforms will also need to account for competing candidate blocks. Until the network chooses the canonical block, transactions from different candidates must remain separated to prevent inaccurate transaction histories.

The Foundation says applications that simply submit transactions and read account balances will not need to migrate as a result of the upgrade.

The 150-millisecond figure remains a simulated target rather than a confirmed result from live-market conditions. Real-world transaction times could also be affected by processing performed by wallets, exchanges, and other applications.

There is still no confirmed date for Alpenglow’s mainnet deployment. Anza’s software roadmap currently allows feature activations to resume on September 28, but that date has not been confirmed as the launch date for Alpenglow.