The Solana Foundation says validator operators must prepare for Alpenglow’s first phase, expected Oct. 21, as the network approaches a change designed to shorten transaction finality.
The activation epoch is expected to begin at approximately 9:20 a.m. ET (13:20 UTC). The foundation has not scheduled a second phase.
Alpenglow changes how validators agree on transactions. In an Oct. 16 report, the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT) put current transaction finality at about 13 seconds. The upgrade targets about 150 milliseconds. Users may receive an initial confirmation sooner, but that does not mean a transaction is final.
The foundation says applications could benefit if the faster finality target is achieved. That target has not been measured on Solana’s current mainnet.
Financial activity on the network has grown ahead of the planned change. FCAT cited RWA.xyz data on tokenized real-world assets and Raiku research on stablecoin transfers in its assessment of Solana’s wider use.
FCAT gave a positive assessment of that wider use and infrastructure improvements, while identifying limits to the network’s resilience. It linked stake concentration partly to validators’ hardware and latency demands and said configurations that share code could be exposed to the same defect.
Earlier EconoTimes coverage of validator concentration examined how concentrated stake could impede transaction finality.
For FCAT, the test is whether performance improves while decentralization and security hold up. The next scheduled step is the expected start of Alpenglow’s first phase on Oct. 21.
