Solana switches on Alpenglow today, its biggest upgrade since 2020. The new consensus targets finality in about 150 milliseconds, roughly 40x faster than the 6 seconds it takes now.

That puts Solana on par with Hyperliquid and Base at about 0.2 seconds. Ethereum still takes about 15 minutes.

Getting here wasn't smooth. The Alpenglow test cluster was wiped and restarted six times, and one migration failed across the whole test network before it worked.