Solana to Deploy Alpenglow on Mainnet Oct. 21, Aiming to Boost Transaction Efficiency

Solana is scheduled to deploy its major Alpenglow consensus algorithm upgrade on the mainnet on Oct. 21. After the upgrade, validator voting will move off-chain, which could sharply reduce the network’s reported transactions per second, or TPS. Actual user transaction processing efficiency, however, could improve.

Finbold reported on Oct. 19 that Alpenglow will replace Solana’s existing consensus structure with a high-performance protocol called Votor. The core change is that vote data generated by validators during transaction approval will be processed outside the blockchain.

Solana is aiming to cut transaction finality to 159 milliseconds from about 12.8 seconds.

The Solana mainnet is currently processing about 4,680 TPS, and a large share of that consists of voting transactions generated during consensus among validators. Once Alpenglow is deployed and those votes move off-chain, officially reported TPS could fall by about 60%.

That does not mean the network’s capacity to process actual user transactions will decline by 60%. With validator votes removed from the count, network metrics may more directly reflect activity generated by real users, including transactions from decentralized applications, or DApps.

Finbold said services that require fast processing speeds, including applications that use artificial intelligence agents, could benefit if transaction finality is significantly shortened.

Meanwhile, SOL has fallen more than 6% over the past 30 days and was trading at about $105.14 as of publication. The upgrade could increase short-term volatility in SOL’s price, Finbold added.