Solana pushes Alpenglow to the testnet stage, with SOL closing in on its January high

Solana has begun deploying its long-planned consensus layer major overhaul program Alpenglow on testnet , advancing this highly anticipated technology upgrade to the open test phase. The move means that wait times for irreversible confirmation of a transaction are expected to be significantly compressed from about 12.8 seconds to around 150 milliseconds, which is a key step in network performance evolution.

Votor was the first to land and completely rebuild the voting system.

Under the upgrade scheme, Alpenglow will replace the current validator used for block consensus TowerBFT consensus mechanism , while Solana virtual machines, transactions, procedures and fee structures remain unchanged.

The core component introduced in the first phase is Votor. It abolishes validator 's existing practice of writing voting transactions on a chain, instead directly transmitting voting information between validator , and then merging these votes into certificates to finalize blocks within one or two rounds of voting, shortening irreversible waiting times for transactions by about 99%.

Anza, the team responsible for Agave validator 's development of software , said that testnet is entering a deployment process and will then progress to devnet, eventually landing on mainnet -beta. This migration builds upon months of preparations by various types of validator , as well as infrastructure vendors who need to adapt streaming transport blocks, tracking votes or systems relying on existing confirmation structures.

Rotor to follow, trading capacity expanded simultaneously

Another component of Alpenglow, Rotor, will be added in the future to replace Solana 's existing block data distribution system Turbine. Its uptime is arranged separately and its current deployment focuses on Votor with faster final confirmation capabilities.

In addition to the consensus overhaul, Solana has recently completed a round of performance upgrades: Transaction V1, which was activated this month, raised the single transaction size cap from 1232 bytes to 4096 bytes; and the time-gap roadmap is also gradually advancing its target from 400 ms to 200 ms.

SOL Rising prices, synchronized expansion of ecological activities

As the technology advances, SOL 's price and ecological data are also warming. At press time, it was trading at around $117, approaching $120 this week for its strongest level since late January. According to CryptoSlate, it has risen by about 25% over the past month cumulatively.

on-chain token Continued growth in the size of legacy assets: The total value of RWA ( RWA ) on the Solana network reached about $4.6 billion at the beginning of September, continuing an upward trend that first broke through $4 billion in August.

Trading activity also accelerated. According to data cited by the Kobeissi Letter, during the week ending September 13, Solana DEX recorded about 208 million pips compared with around 190 million on the New York Stock Exchange in the same period, narrowing the gap with Nasdaq to approximately 47 million. During September, aggregator Jupiter completed more than 80 million transactions, an increase of 38% year-over-year.

Long-term supporters are optimistic, market cap gap remains significant

The ecological expansion also reinforced the optimistic stance of some early supporters. Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani reportedly said that SOL is expected to surpass Ethereum in the current market cycle, citing a growing number of developers opting for Solana and the network's recent lead in network fees over Ethereum .

However, the gap is still clear: according to Samani's comparison scale, Solana market cap was close to $58 billion while ETH was about $293 billion.

For Solana , the more pressing test returns to the network itself. testnet provides the first large-scale environment for validator and infrastructure providers to run Alpenglow, after which the consensus system will also move towards devnet, and eventually deployed into mainnet that carries its growing transaction with token 's chemical asset economy.

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, published by CryptoSlate and originally titled Solana moves Alpenglow into testnet as SOL nears January highs.