Solana developers from Anza announced the launch of the Alpenglow upgrade in a community-created test cluster. This upgrade shifts the blockchain from its current consensus system to a new architecture designed to drastically reduce transaction finalization time and improve network responsiveness.
Alpenglow is described as the largest change to Solana's core protocol to date. During validator testing, SOL price rose over 15% in 24 hours, outperforming all top-10 cryptocurrencies by market cap in that period.