Solana just deployed Alpenglow on its second public testnet. The network's biggest consensus overhaul since launch is now live in testing. The target: 100–150ms finality. Down from 12.8 seconds today. • Current finality: 12.8s (TowerBFT) • Alpenglow target: 100–150ms (Votor) • Improvement: ~100x faster • Testnet activation: Sept 24 (slot 444,625,255) • Devnet activation: Sept 25 (slot 504,148,999) • Testnet performance: >25,000 TPS at 150ms finality (Ilan Gitter) • Mainnet date: Not confirmed Here's the nuance most headlines will skip. Alpenglow doesn't touch the SVM, transaction format, or fees. Wallet users don't need to migrate anything. Applications keep processing transactions as they do now. The change is entirely underneath — replacing TowerBFT's onchain voting with Votor's offchain BLS certificate aggregation. ‌‌ The catch: Firedancer and Frankendancer haven't implemented Votor yet. The first mainnet migration depends entirely on Agave 4.3. That's a single-client dependency risk on the biggest consensus change in Solana's history. ‌ If Alpenglow's 150ms finality is a simulation target, not a live-market result, does that change the institutional settlement thesis?