Solana has begun rolling out its Alpenglow upgrade on the public testnet, the next stage in a plan to sharply reduce transaction finality from roughly 13 seconds to 150 milliseconds. Finality is the point at which a transaction is considered irreversible, a key threshold for exchanges, bridges and merchants before they act on incoming payments.

The testnet deployment lets developers trial the migration on a live-like version of the network that uses valueless tokens, allowing bugs to be found and the chain to be restarted without putting user funds at risk. A mainnet update is tentatively listed for Sept. 28, but that date is not a confirmed launch for Alpenglow.

Consensus change at the core

The upgrade replaces Solana’s current TowerBFT consensus system with a new voting protocol called Votor. Under the existing design, validators write votes onchain and accumulate enough of them across 32 slots before a block is final.

With Votor, validators send votes directly to one another and can finalize a block after one or two rounds. That removes the need for the longer sequence of onchain votes while leaving the way applications execute transactions unchanged. Users also do not need to change wallets or alter how they send funds.

From dedicated trials to the public testnet

Alpenglow had already been running for more than four months on a smaller network built specifically for the upgrade. Moving it onto Solana’s established public testnet is meant to show whether the wider mix of computers and services that already operate the blockchain can make the switch together.

Because the public testnet more closely resembles the environment used by the broader ecosystem, this phase is expected to surface compatibility issues that may not appear on a more limited development network.

Software requirements and missing clients

The first testnet migration requires Agave 4.3, the main validator software used on Solana and maintained by Anza, one of the companies involved in developing the network. Anza recommended Agave 4.3 to all mainnet validators on Sept. 21 after initially rolling it out to operators accounting for 10% and then 25% of the SOL securing the network.

The initial Alpenglow test does not include Firedancer or Frankendancer, two alternative validator clients built by Jump Crypto. Those clients are intended to lessen Solana’s dependence on a single software stack, so their absence means the first migration will run entirely through Agave.

What is confirmed next

Anza’s schedule shows Sept. 28 as a tentative date for enabling features included in Agave 4.3 on Solana’s main network. However, that is not a confirmed date for Alpenglow to go live on mainnet.

As of early Wednesday, Anza’s tracker still listed the public testnet switch itself as pending. That leaves the immediate next step centered on completing the testnet migration and validating that the wider network setup can operate with the new consensus design before any confirmed production rollout.

Source: www.coindesk.com