Solana has initiated testing for a new network upgrade called Alpenglow, which is designed to significantly enhance transaction finality. Currently, the time it takes for a transaction to be considered final on the Solana blockchain is 12.8 seconds. This new upgrade seeks to dramatically reduce that duration.
The primary objective of the Alpenglow upgrade is to achieve a transaction finality time of just 150 milliseconds. This rapid acceleration in finality would enable various participants, such as cryptocurrency exchanges, blockchain bridges, and merchants, to treat payments as irreversible almost immediately after they occur.