CoinDesk reported that Solana has launched the Alpenglow public testnet, a major upgrade that aims to reduce transaction finality from approximately 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds. Alpenglow replaces the existing consensus system, TowerBFT, with a new voting protocol called Votor. Unlike the traditional method where validators record votes on the blockchain and accumulate them over multiple slots, Alpenglow's structure allows blocks to be finalized in just one or two rounds through direct voting between validators.
