Solana Alpenglow Upgrade: The 150ms Target and Safety Trade-Off

And so with the current system, the tower BFT, there are a few issues. I mean, one is it's really hard to just prove from a mathematical level. It's been band-aid after band-aid on fork selection.

Band-Aid after band-aid. Now, that's not a critic. That's one of the people who built Salana talking about the same system that's been running it since 2020. And on Wednesday, the 21st of October, they finally ripped it out. All right.

Salana switched on a new engine called Alpenlo. And the people who built it call it the biggest change to Salana's call since launch. Now the headline number is that payments go from about 12 seconds to final down to about 150 milliseconds. Now that's quicker than a blink, right? And a lot of people saw that and thought that's it.

Salana is the fastest thing in crypto. Job done. Well, launch day came. Salana's own dashboard was reading 6.6 seconds, not 150 milliseconds. And there's a reason for that.

There's a trade-off in the safety maths that most headlines skip. And that's also why Salana's transactions count is about to look like it's crashed when it hasn't. And there's a 30 secondond check I'm going to give you to run on any number you see. And there's a link in the description. It's the first one, guys.

It changed how a lot of people handle the big calls on a coin like this. I'm going to tell you why before we 5 minutes in. Because if you are holding a proper bag of Salana, then this does come down to one question. The builders say one thing, the headlines say another, and the critics say something else. So, who do you believe when it's your money riding on it?

Now, by the end of this, guys, you're going to have the numbers lined up side by side, a check that you can use on any of them. And the three decisions it leaves you with, that's what you got to decide. So, Alen Glow switched on just before 3:00 in the afternoon. That's UK time on Wednesday the 21st, right? And here's how the team that built it explained the change on launch day.

Alonglow is Salana's [music] brand new consensus engine built to bring finalization down by more than 100x and scale the chain in many different ways. Tower BFT [music] is the current Salana consensus mechanism. It involves stacking a tower of votes in order to achieve finalization. [music] But the problem is it takes time to construct that tower. And even though it's only a few seconds, that's way too long when we're talking about snappy responsive things for payments [music] and emerging use cases. Way too long.

So here's the plain version. Salana runs on about 700 computers around the world called validators. Every block they vote on whether it's good. Now under the old system, those votes were stacked up like a tower, right? And a payment wasn't truly final until the tower was tall enough.

Now under Alpenlo they send their votes straight to each other and once again and once enough of them agree it's done. So if you just hold Salana then you don't need to do a thing. Salana's own pay is no action needed and final matters more than it sounds until a payment's final right it's in limbo. It's actually the difference between a card machine saying approved and the money actually landing in the shop's account. So it was a nailbiter getting there right 2 days before the switch one tracker show closed to half of all state Salana still wasn't ready for it.

The changeover needed validators holding at least 82% of the stake on board and on that day it went through. Validators also now pay one small flat fee every couple of days instead of paying for every single vote and that fee gets burned so it comes straight out of circulation. All right, so that's what we're going to be talking about today guys. Welcome back to the channel. I hope you remember to hit that subscribe button.

Whether you are coming back for the fifth, 10th time, it doesn't matter. Please just double check for me. All right, we have many people that keep returning and we can see in the analytics that are not hitting the subscribe button. So please do that. We're about to cross 400,000.

That would be absolutely insane. If you're new here, my name's George Lee. There's many of us on this channel. We all have different styles and different ways of getting you the facts. But one thing we always do in unison is give you the exact facts and never take sides.

So this is only my opinion. You might like it, you might hate it. Let me know in the comments and let's get deep into this. All right. [music] Now, picture this. You've held Salana through the ups and downs, and then the big upgrade lands.

One video says it's the fastest chain on the planet and the next says something's broken because the numbers have fallen off the cliff. Some bloke on X posts a different one. And you're now sat there at midnight trying to work out which one's lying. You don't know whether to buy more, sell some, or just switch your phone off, right? And with money that you're counting on, a wrong decision isn't small.

And doing this on your own is really hard, right? The big funds of analysis who actually read the code and the data before they move a penny. And most people holding a bag like me and you have a feed full of people shouting. Now, that's exactly why the first links in the description underneath this video, right? Instead of guessing who to believe, you've got a team reading this stuff every single week.

And it starts with a short free video and a free chat about your coins. I'm going to tell you more about this, but I want to give you part of the story first so you can see how this relates to the course that we have. Now, Salana has always sold itself on speed. Thousands of transactions a second, tiny fees. So, why does any of this matter if you just hold the coin?

Well, here's Brennan Watt, who actually now runs the team behind it back in 2025 on who was waiting on that old 12.8 8 seconds.

And then also by design, um, the finality is 12.8 seconds cuz we have this 32 deep tower. And I'm not going to go into all the nitty-gritty details there, but kind of the gist is even in the the good case, 32 deep tower times 400 millisecond slot times is what gets you at this 12.8 second finality. Um, which is kind of an eternity. Uh, you know, especially if you're a, you know, circle or Coinbase or someone that when you're kind of handling offramping, you really need to wait for that full finality. kind of an eternity. That's what they say, right?

Think about when you send coins to an exchange, it won't credit you until the payment's final, which is partly why deposits can take a while. So, if your Circle or Coinbase moving real money for real customers, you wait for final. So, this is about whether the big payment firms and exchanges want to build on Salana. And that's the bull case, right? And it's a real one.

And credit where it's due. The people who designed Alpen Glow are a research team from Zurich who first got noticed for publishing a simple paper on the weakness in Salana's old system. By the way, instead of arguing with them, Salana hired them to fix it. But here's something to keep in your head. When Alpenlow was first unvealed, that was at Salana's Accelerate conference in May 2025.

The man leading the Zurich team, Roger Wattingher, said when he thought it would and I'm going to let you watch that now.

And will be a lot of testing probably. We work with all the partners which are implementing clients. They already started implementing them, but uh there will be a lot of testing to make sure that this all works uh as intended. Uh and then at some point we'll you know ship hopefully not die I guess uh somewhat maybe towards the end of the year or maybe beginning of next year roughly that's sort of how we how we feel like it

maybe beginning of next year. Well it did land in October 2026 to be fair to him. He said roughly and a lot of testing is exactly what you want but it's a good reminder that dates from the people building something are hopes not promises and on Salana safety has never been small right on the 6th of February 2024 the whole network stopped. And here's CNBC that afternoon.

Transactions stopped processing around 5:00 a.m. Shortly after, Salana's status account on X said engineers across the ecosystem were investigating an outage on the mainet that eventually led engineers to push a software update to patch the issue and restart [music] the network. By 10:00 a.m., roughly 5 hours after the outage began, Salana's network was up and running. Its status page lists the outage as the network's first in nearly a year, going back to February [music] 25th, 2023. Network instability has been a criticism of the Salana network in the past.

In 2022, it saw several bouts of outages and network instability.

And back on the 14th of September 2021, it was worse, right? Bots flooded the network during a token launch. Validators ran out of memory and crashed. And Salana was down for 17 hours. Getting it going again needed validators holding 80% of the stake to agree on a restart.

Now, plenty of people holding Salana now were holding it then. So if your coins are on a network that the network stops then you can't have then you can't move them full stop. So when the people who run Salana change the engine the speed is the headline but the safety is what you actually need to know about. Now to be fair there's a real bare case here right and it's not comfortable for holders. Critics will say Salana has a habit of chasing speed first and safety second and that a chain with a history and outages should be very careful about changing its engine at all.

Now that's a fair point to make. All right, the answer from the builder is that the new system is designed to keep going even with a fifth of a validators offline and they're published the mask for anyone to check. But it'll only be proven by running. It's not by posters. So what who's right?

Well, the builders of the critics. The builders have every reason to talk it up. The critics have every reason to talk it down. And you're the one holding the coin. The only honest way to answer that is to line the actual numbers up side by side with who said and when.

So let's do that. Now here's the first one. The target is 150 milliseconds. But when Cointelegraph reported the launch, Foundation's own dashboard was showing 6.6 seconds to final. Now, that might be a new system bedding in or a dashboard measuring something different.

And Salana's own page says that the 150 is an expectation. It's not a constant. But it does tell you the 150 is a target, not a measurement. And the reason it matters is real. Visa has been settling some USDC payments on Salana since 2023.

PayPal put its own stable coin on it in 2024. And in May this year, Western Union launched its own dollar stable coin on Salana. and quickly finality is just the sort of thing firms like these need. Now second, even the before figure is argued over and the builders say that the old system took 12.8 seconds. Researchers at Galaxy, a big crypto investment firm, reckon that the faster block Salon has been moving to, it would be near a six. So the jump might be less dramatic than the headline, but still big and just not the poster number.

Now third, this is the one that I'll catch people out. Those validator votes used to count as transactions in the week before the switch, they were actually nearly 2/3 of everything slaughtered process. Now they're gone from the count. So you'll see the chart showing Salana's transactions falling off a cliff. This isn't people leaving, right?

It's the votes no longer being counted and Salana's own page saying so. And if the fourth one is about safety, and it's the trade-off that most of the headlines skipped. Now, here's Roger Watenhova explaining it to a research audience last year. So, how can we get better than 33%. And the answer is that we don't have security against arbitrary malicious attacks but we have security against you know uh different types of uh failures so to speak.

So we only have 20% security against arbitrary malicious colluding uh enemies. So 20% up to less than 20% I should say of the stake can be uh controlled by the adversary which colludes in arbitrary malicious ways. Now, did you catch that? 20% where most systems like this work to 33. So, the old system could handle up to a third of the staking in acting against it.

Now, the new one handles up to a fifth acting against it. And on top of that, another fifth can just be offline and it still works. That's a sensible bet because machines crash far more often than people attack. But, it's a lower line for anyone trying to cheat. And the penalty that's meant to stop them is not switched on yet.

Now, I'm going to show you that in a minute, right? And why the builders reckon that it's one of the easiest bits to add. And here's one for free and it takes 30 seconds before you believe any number about any coin as three things. Who measured it? When?

And is it a target or a test or live data? And 150 milliseconds at a second is a target. 6.6 seconds was a live reading on launch day. And both could be true at once. And that's one check.

The rest like what you'd actually do with your Salana if the next weeks of data came in better or worse, depends on your own bag. And that's the bit the team goes through with its members. So what happens next? Well, the first few weeks of live data will show how close Salana really gets to that 150. The second half of the upgrade doesn't have a date yet, and that's the sort of thing the research team keeps an eye on for its members.

Remember that penalty I mentioned, right? Here's Watenhover again on Solano's own channel last month.

So, I guess what is it just a no vote? We don't have slashing today. So, this is just a no vote,

but we could. So, this is this is one of the easiest things to do slashing for, right? Because that's really the

Yeah, it's very clear that we in this case, we should absolutely slash.

Now, we don't have slashing today. Slashing means taking money off a validator who cheats and it's planned but it isn't switched on yet. None of this means Salana's unsafe. The builders want slashing in and they've said so on camera and the speed side which is the hard bit. It's already live right and it means the safety story is still being finished while the speed story is already on the posters.

Some of you are going fair enough you can. But official accounts post targets and on launch day the live dashboard said something different. Both were true at once and you'd only spot that by asking who measured it and when. Now, my honest take, Alpenlow is a genuinely big upgrade, and the team deserve credit for being upfront about the old system, but what it changes is how carefully we read the numbers. And if you're asking who measured it from now on, then good, cuz I'm going to be asking that, too.

Pop Sol in the comments if you've got that question in your head. Now, quick recap. Salana's new engine is live. 150 milliseconds is the target. It's not yet the reading.

Transactions charts will drop because votes are not counted anymore, right? And the safety line is now 20% bad actors plus 20% offline with penalty still to come. And that leaves you with three decisions. Where does your lawn actually sit and could you move it if the network had a bad day? Is it doing anything for you while you wait without handing it to someone who can freeze it?

And when would you move in or out? Because if you haven't decided, the next scary chart will decide for you. So, if you take one thing from this guys, a numbers a target or real before you act on it. And here's what all of this really shows. Every big upgrade comes with a headline number and the real numbers take weeks to arrive.

Most of us have bought on a headline, sold on a scary chart, and found out later neither told the story. All right? Not the whole one, because we're not daffed, right? We just have never been sat down and showed all these things, showed how to read the numbers behind the headline. But none of this is clever stuff once someone's walked you through it.

And I'm saying that because it happened to me. I'm not going to tell you what to do with your bag in this video because that depends on what you're holding and your entire situation. But you don't have to work this out on your own. You can hit the link down below, check out our private intelligence network where I change my life, many others are, and they will teach you exactly what I bring you on this channel in way more depth. All right, it it literally goes so much deeper than I can even explain in this video.

Never mind the hundreds that we're going to be doing every single month. Basically, the research team digs into where this is heading and members hear it first. And every week there's a call where the team walks you through how they're reading it and where they're buying and taking profit themselves. So, you're not guessing every single time a big upgrade lands. All you got to do, guys, is hit the link down below and it's completely free with no obligation.

It takes about 15 minutes. You're going to get a call, then someone will discuss your exact plan and portfolio with you. And if you decide to go ahead, then that would be absolutely fantastic news for you because I've been in your situation. So, check that out, guys. And as always, hit the subscribe button and stay bullish.

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