Solana Moves Alpenglow Upgrade to Public Testnet

Solana has begun moving its Alpenglow consensus upgrade onto the public testnet, a milestone that lets the network’s wider validator community exercise a change designed to shrink transaction finality to a fraction of its current time.

Anza, the firm behind the Agave validator client, published Agave v4.3.0 on September 18 as a stable build it calls suitable for testnet, devnet and mainnet beta.

On September 21 it told all mainnet validators to run the version, after first delivering it to operators in charge of 10% and then 25% of staked SOL.

The move is one of Solana’s most consequential in years: it targets a cut in finality from roughly 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds.