On October 21, Solana initiated the Alpenglow upgrade, marking one of the network's most significant underlying transformations since 2020. This upgrade will replace the existing validator voting mechanism, significantly reducing transaction finality time from approximately 6 seconds to just 150 milliseconds—a speed increase of about 40 times. The core of the upgrade lies in shifting validator voting from on-chain to off-chain and integrating it into certificates, enabling transactions to achieve final confirmation within one to two rounds of consensus. If the mainnet performs as expected, transaction confirmation speeds will approach the experience of credit card payments or centralized trading platforms, thereby enhancing the user experience for meme coin trading, stablecoin payments, and on-chain trading platforms while reducing validator costs. After the upgrade, the daily voting fee of approximately 2 SOL will be eliminated, replaced by a fixed validator access fee of 0.8 SOL per epoch (approximately every 24 hours), with costs expected to decrease by about 60%. The testing process for this upgrade has not been smooth; the testnet has been wiped and restarted six times since its launch in early May, including a rollback after one failed migration attempt. However, subsequent migrations were successful, paving the way for the mainnet launch, and none of the issues involved real-world financial risks. The upgrade is scheduled to commence at the start of Epoch 1064 on Wednesday and will complete the transition at Slot 459653000 after a 5,000-slot transition phase.