Solana launches Alpenglow testnet, targets 150 ms transaction finality

Solana has launched the public testnet for Alpenglow, a major upgrade aimed at reducing transaction finality to 150 milliseconds from about 12.8 seconds, CoinDesk reported. Alpenglow replaces the existing TowerBFT consensus system with a new voting protocol called Votor. Unlike the current structure, in which validators record votes on the blockchain and accumulate them across multiple slots, the new design confirms blocks in one or two rounds through direct voting among validators.