Solana starts testing upgrade that could cut finality from 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds
Solana has begun testing a major protocol upgrade that aims to reduce transaction finality from 12.8 seconds to approximately 150 milliseconds, according to a report by CoinDesk. The improvement would represent a reduction of roughly 98.8% in the time required for transactions to be considered irreversible on the network. The upgrade is currently in the testing phase, with no confirmed timeline for a mainnet deployment.
Finality refers to the point at which a blockchain transaction can no longer be altered or reversed, a critical metric for applications requiring near-instant settlement certainty. Solana has long positioned itself as one of the fastest layer-1 blockchains, but its current finality window has remained a technical limitation for certain high-frequency use cases, particularly in decentralized finance and payments infrastructure.
A finality time of 150 milliseconds would place Solana significantly ahead of most competing layer-1 networks, including Ethereum, which typically requires several minutes for economic finality. For developers building latency-sensitive applications, this could influence decisions around which blockchain infrastructure to deploy on, potentially affecting developer activity and ecosystem growth across the industry.
Observers will be watching how the testing phase progresses and whether any issues emerge before a broader rollout. The upgrade's reception among validators, who play a key role in Solana's consensus mechanism, will also be a factor in determining the pace of adoption across the network.
Source: CoinDesk
