Today, October 21, Solana is expected to activate the Alpenglow upgrade on mainnet. The estimated time is around 14:50 UTC.
The upgrade completely replaces the consensus system, moving the network from its current mechanism to a new architecture. The goal is to sharply cut transaction finality times and make the network more responsive. Blocks will be confirmed almost instantly.
Alpenglow is described as the largest change to Solana’s core protocol to date.
