Solana Set for Major Speed Boost via Alpenglow Upgrade—Here’s What to Expect

Solana is about to get a whole lot faster, developers say, after a proposal for a major network upgrade passed on Tuesday.

Validators for the popular layer-1 blockchain network voted 98% in favor of SIMD-0236, the Solana improvement proposal that implements Alpenglow, a new consensus protocol conceived by the research team at Solana research and development firm, Anza. Speedier transaction confirmations are a key part of the improvements coming to Solana.

“The biggest difference users will feel right away will be a reduction in confirmation latency to  approximately 150-200ms,” Anza Lead Economist Max Resnick told Decrypt.

“Right now, optimistic confirmations are served in about 1 second, so it’s at least a 5x improvement from today,” he continued. “Apps are going to feel a lot snappier and exchanges will be able to safely credit deposits much faster than the full 12.8 second finality window they adhere to today.”

First introduced in May, Alpenglow is designed to reconfigure Solana’s existing consensus protocol and put the network on par with centralized infrastructure used in traditional finance. The proposal billed it as a “major overhaul of Solana’s core consensus protocol” with “modern architecture focused on performance, resilience, and whenever possible simplicity.”

Now approved by the network’s validators, Resnick hopes Alpenglow’s implementation will be live on testnet by the Solana Breakpoint conference in December, with a mainnet release planned for Q1 2026. 

“Alpenglow is the most significant rewrite of the Solana protocol to date. Its passage today paves the way for faster processing and finality, and for internet capital markets to emerge,” Multicoin Capital Managing Partner Kyle Samani told Decrypt. 

“One of the most important attributes of Solana success is the developer community’s dogged pursuit of performance and their ability to push distributed computing to the limits of physics,” he added. “Alpenglow will be an important mile marker on our way to 1 million transactions per second.”

The consensus protocol upgrade is one of a handful of planned technological improvements for Solana over the coming years, which supporters say are designed to make the blockchain home to the world’s best financial markets. Recently, Solana achieved more than 100K transactions per second in a test run by a Solana developer. 

Analysts told Decrypt on Tuesday that Alpenglow’s implementation could help push Solana (SOL) to as high as $250 by year’s end. 

Solana is up about 5% in the last 24 hours to around $207, still 29% off its February all-time high of $293.31.