Solana is aiming to bring Finality down to 150ms this time. Looking at this number in the current public blockchain landscape, you can see where the performance competition is heading. According to information released by the Solana Foundation, Alpenglow Phase 1 will start replacing the existing consensus protocol with Votor, targeting a final confirmation time of around 150ms. Currently, Solana’s pre-confirmation latency is about 400ms, while final confirmation with TowerBFT takes roughly 12.8 seconds. A lot of the time, when we say a chain is “fast,” we’re usually comparing TPS. But TPS measures how many transactions a chain can process per second, while Finality is about something else: how long it takes for a transaction to be truly confirmed after submission. These two metrics impact user experience in very different ways. A chain might theoretically process a lot of transactions at once, but if final confirmation still takes time, users will feel that delay when making payments, trading, or using on-chain applications. So as public blockchains evolve, the performance competition is gradually shifting from “how much can be processed” to “how quickly can it be truly confirmed.” That’s what makes this 150ms target so interesting. If they can actually achieve something close to this level, the noticeable waiting time between on-chain operations and regular internet products will continue to shrink. Over the past few years, people have been used to ranking blockchain performance by TPS, but in the future, we might need to pay more attention to another number: Finality. Because users don’t necessarily know what consensus protocol they’re using, nor do they care about the TPS behind it. What they ultimately feel usually boils down to one thing: After I click, how long do I have to wait?