99% Back Solana Upgrade to Slash Transactions to 150ms

- Governance votes overwhelmingly favor Solana's Alpenglow protocol enhancement. - Upgrade aims to reduce transaction finality time to 150 milliseconds, enabling real-time applications. On September 1, 2025, Cointelegraph reported that 99% of governance votes approved Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade. This approval sets the stage for a groundbreaking leap in blockchain performance. Developed by Anza, the upgrade will reduce transaction finality time from 12.8 seconds to just 150 milliseconds—nearly 100 times faster. This milestone aligns Solana’s blockchain with Web2 speeds, opening the door to innovative real-time applications in gaming and decentralized finance (DeFi). The governance process began on August 21, 2025, and reached the necessary 33% quorum to secure its implementation. Once deployed, Alpenglow will propel Solana to the forefront of Layer-1 blockchains as one of the fastest in the industry. Its 150-millisecond finality time outpaces competitors like Sui, known for its 400-millisecond speeds. It is even faster than the average Google search, which has a response time of around 200 milliseconds. The promise of Alpenglow is anchored in two cutting-edge technologies: Votor and Rotor. Votor introduces an innovative voting mechanism to accelerate block finalization. By replacing the current TowerBFT consensus, it finalizes blocks in a single round with 80% network participation or two rounds with 60% responsiveness. This dual-tier approach enhances speed while maintaining security and reliability. Rotor revolutionizes Solana’s data propagation by superseding the existing Proof-of-History (PoH) timestamping model. This new protocol minimizes network hops, optimizes bandwidth, and ensures seamless data dissemination. Rotor scales Solana's infrastructure, positioning the network as a top choice for developers building high-performance applications in gaming and DeFi ecosystems. While Alpenglow pushes boundaries in transaction speed and network efficiency, Solana’s white paper acknowledges it will not entirely resolve the network’s past outage issues. These problems stem from a dependency on a single validator client, Agave. A separate initiative will introduce Firedancer, an independent validator client, to address this. Firedancer aims to enhance resilience by diversifying the ecosystem. As of 02:15 UTC on September 1, Solana (SOL) is trading at $200.485. According to market data, this reflects a 2.637% dip in 24-hour trading volume.