Solana's largest network upgrade since 2020, Alpenglow, officially went live on Wednesday. This upgrade moves validator voting off-chain, packaging it into certificates that can lock in transactions within 1-2 rounds. The goal is to reduce transaction finality time from around 6 seconds to approximately 150 milliseconds, speeding things up by about 40x. Currently, the 6-second confirmation time can lead to price changes before transactions are locked, forcing exchanges and payment apps to wait before considering deposits as complete. In comparison, Ethereum takes about 13 minutes to achieve full finality. Validator costs are expected to drop by roughly 60%. Currently, validators spend about 2 SOL daily on voting fees. Alpenglow eliminates voting fees, replacing them with a fixed validator entry fee of 0.8 SOL per epoch (around 24 hours). Since the testnet launched in early May, it has been wiped and restarted six times, including one instance where a full network migration failed and had to be rolled back. According to Galaxy Digital, one of the approximately 100 validator operators on the testnet, subsequent migrations were successfully completed. The upgrade switched over at the start of epoch 1064 on Wednesday, with the actual changes taking effect at slot 459,653,000. (CoinDesk) https://www.(wublock123.com)/news/solana-alpenglow-network-upgrade-150ms-finality-target-70440