Solana moves Alpenglow to testnet as SOL nears January highs

Solana has begun rolling out its Alpenglow consensus overhaul on testnet. Alpenglow targets finality of about 150 milliseconds, compared with roughly 12.8 seconds under the current TowerBFT system. The upgrade leaves the Solana Virtual Machine, transactions, programs, and fees unchanged. Its first phase introduces Votor, which sends validator votes directly between validators instead of using onchain vote transactions. Certificates from those votes can finalize blocks within one or two voting rounds. This could cut the wait for an irreversible transaction by about 99%. Anza said testnet was entering the rollout process. Devnet deployment will follow before a possible move to mainnet-beta. Validators and infrastructure providers must adjust systems that stream blocks, track votes, or rely on Solana's existing commitment structure. The next test is whether Alpenglow performs reliably enough on testnet and devnet to reach mainnet-beta without disrupting infrastructure providers. Alpenglow will later add Rotor as a replacement for Turbine's block-data distribution system. Rotor is scheduled separately from the immediate Votor rollout. Solana activated Transaction V1 this month. Transaction V1 raised the maximum transaction size to 4,096 bytes from 1,232 bytes. Solana's slot-time roadmap has reduced the target from 400 milliseconds toward 200 milliseconds. SOL traded around $117 as of press time. SOL reached almost $120 this week. SOL has gained roughly 25% over the past month, CryptoSlate data shows. Real-world assets on Solana reached about $4.6 billion in early September. The sector exceeded $4 billion for the first time in August. Solana decentralized exchanges recorded about 208 million individual spot trades in the week ending Sept. 13. The New York Stock Exchange recorded roughly 190 million trades during that week, according to data cited by the Kobeissi Letter. The gap with Nasdaq narrowed to about 47 million trades. Jupiter recorded more than 80 million trades during September. Jupiter's trade count rose 38% from the previous month. Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani reportedly said that he expects SOL's market capitalization to surpass Ethereum's during the current market cycle. Samani argued that developers are increasingly choosing Solana. Samani also pointed to Solana's recent lead over Ethereum in network fees. His comparison put Solana near $58 billion in market capitalization. His comparison put ETH at about $293 billion.