Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade is planned to replace the network’s current validator voting mechanism and target final confirmation in 150 milliseconds, down from about six seconds, according to BlockBeats.
Voting and finality design
The plan moves validator votes off-chain and combines them into certificates so transactions can reach finality in one or two consensus rounds. The speed figures are targets; the source says the user-experience improvement depends on the mainnet operating as expected.
Validator fees and testnet history
Validators currently pay about 2 SOL per day in voting fees. The plan would replace that with a 0.8 SOL fee per roughly 24-hour epoch, with costs expected to fall about 60%. Galaxy Digital said the testnet was cleared and restarted six times after launching in early May; one migration failed and was rolled back. The reported incidents occurred on testnet and did not involve real funds.