446 of 654. That is how many participating validators voted to certify the block from which Solana switched to Alpenglow on Wednesday 21 October, CoinDesk reports.
The handover from the old system took about 900 milliseconds, according to the Solana Foundation. That measures the switch itself, not how quickly transactions settle.
Previously, validators recorded their votes as transactions on the chain and accumulated approvals across successive blocks. Now they send votes directly to one another and combine them into certificates, so a block can become final after one or two voting rounds. Wallets, fees and how applications run are unchanged.
The headline claim is finality of about 150 milliseconds under normal conditions, down from several seconds. CoinDesk is careful to call that a target and not a guarantee for every payment.
Anza, which makes the Agave software, says some users may see finality information later than validators do. Many apps already showed transactions as confirmed before they were final, so the gain mostly helps services that must release funds or goods immediately.
There is a bookkeeping side effect too. Network dashboards will show lower transaction totals, because votes no longer count as on-chain transactions, so comparisons with earlier periods need user transactions counted separately.
The foundation set the date a week earlier and the date held, which is more than many upgrades manage. What nobody has published yet is the finality that real traffic produces, and that is the number the upgrade will be judged on.
