Solana’s Alpenglow, its biggest network overhaul since 2020, goes live Wednesday

"Solana's transaction count is going to look a lot lower this week, and people will ask if something's wrong. It isn't,” shared Robin Nordnes, CEO and founder of Raiku, which builds trading infrastructure on Solana, in an email.. “Most of what got counted before was validators voting, and that's off-chain now. The trading's all still there.”

“For desks, faster finality is nice, but it was never the bottleneck. Being close to where the block is built still is,” he added.

Validators also get a cheaper bill. They currently burn through about 2 SOL a day on vote fees, a cost that doubled after Solana recently cut its slot times, the window each block gets, to about 200 milliseconds.

Alpenglow scraps those fees in favor of a flat entry charge called a validator admission ticket, set at 0.8 SOL per epoch, a period of about 24 hours. That’s roughly 60% cheaper.

Getting here wasn’t smooth.

The test network was wiped and restarted from scratch six times since launching in early May, and one attempt to migrate to the new system failed network-wide and had to be rolled back, according to a post from Galaxy Digital, one of roughly 100 validator operators on the test network. A later migration went through, clearing the way for Wednesday’s launch.