Solana’s Alpenglow, its biggest network overhaul since 2020, goes live Wednesday
But cutting that to a fraction of a second gets Solana much closer to the feel of a card payment or a trade on a centralized exchange (Ethereum, by comparison, takes roughly 13 minutes to reach full finality).
Read More: Solana is about to halve its block times as final 200-millisecond upgrade nears
Validators also get a cheaper bill. They currently burn through about 2 SOL a day on vote fees, a cost that doubled after Solana recently cut its slot times, the window each block gets, to about 200 milliseconds.
Alpenglow scraps those fees in favor of a flat entry charge called a validator admission ticket, set at 0.8 SOL per epoch, a period of about 24 hours. That’s roughly 60% cheaper.
Getting here wasn’t smooth.
The test network was wiped and restarted from scratch six times since launching in early May, and one attempt to migrate to the new system failed network-wide and had to be rolled back, according to a post from Galaxy Digital, one of roughly 100 validator operators on the test network. A later migration went through, clearing the way for Wednesday’s launch.
None of that put real money at risk, since it all happened on a network built for exactly that kind of breakage.