Solana

<h2 id="header-0">Key Facts</h2>
<ul>
 <li>Solana's Alpenglow upgrade went live at 9:54 a.m. ET on Wednesday with 654 validators taking part, targeting finality of about 150 milliseconds, Anza said.</li>
 <li>SOL rose 1.8% over 24 hours to near $108.40 at 12:54 p.m. ET, roughly matching Bitcoin's 2.2% gain, while US Solana ETFs posted net outflows in 13 of 14 October sessions, about $64 million in all.</li>
 <li>The Solana Foundation's dashboard showed 6.6-second finality shortly after the switch, Cointelegraph reported, so the 150-millisecond figure remains a design target for now.</li>
</ul>
Solana (<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/solana/">SOL</a>) rose about 2% to near $108 on Wednesday after its Alpenglow upgrade went live, a gain in line with Bitcoin (<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/">BTC</a>). Fund buyers have yet to follow.
The upgrade rewrote how Solana's <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://coinmarketcap.com/academy/glossary/validator">validators</a> agree on blocks, and it went in without a reported hitch, according to Anza, the network's core developer. Investors have kept pulling money from US Solana funds on most days this month, SoSoValue data show. A trading-infrastructure founder says faster settlement was never what held traders back, which leaves a return of fund inflows as the signal to watch.
Robin Nordnes, who runs Solana trading-infrastructure firm Raiku, said the speed gain matters less to trading desks than it sounds.
“For desks, faster finality is nice, but it was never the bottleneck. Being close to where the block is built still is,” Nordnes told <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/10/21/solana-s-alpenglow-its-biggest-network-overhaul-since-2020-goes-live-wednesday">CoinDesk</a>.
<h2 id="header-1">What Changed on Solana? Finality Targeted at 150 Milliseconds</h2>
Finality is the point at which a transaction can no longer be reversed. Under Solana's old system, validators voted by posting transactions to the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://coinmarketcap.com/academy/glossary/blockchain">blockchain</a>, and finality took several seconds.
Alpenglow moves those votes off the chain. Validators send them to each other and bundle them into certificates, which Anza says cuts the target time to about 150 milliseconds.
The switch, with 654 validators taking part, took less than a second, Anza <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://x.com/anza_xyz/status/2112905481476091961">said</a> on X.<tweet-embed url="https://x.com/anza_xyz/status/2112905478921736411"></tweet-embed>
“This is the largest, most ambitious blockchain upgrade since ‘The Merge,’” said Brennan Watt, Anza's chief executive, in a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/alpenglow-is-live-on-solana-the-worlds-fastest-finality-on-a-global-network-302915579.html">statement</a>.
Early readings are still settling. The Solana Foundation's dashboard showed finality of 6.6 seconds shortly after the switch, Cointelegraph <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/solanas-alpenglow-launches-mainnet-99-faster-finality">reported</a>.
<h2 id="header-2">Why Is SOL Down This Month? Fund Holders Kept Selling</h2>
US spot Solana <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://coinmarketcap.com/academy/glossary/exchange-traded-fund-etf">ETFs</a> posted net outflows in 13 of 14 sessions this month through Tuesday, SoSoValue <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://sosovalue.com/assets/etf/us-sol-spot">data</a> show. Bitwise's fund accounted for about three-quarters of the money withdrawn.
The funds' assets are also shrinking, down about 16% from their late-September peak.
Corporate holders have sold too. SkyAI, formerly Sharps Technology, sold all of its SOL to fund a share buyback, The Block <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.theblock.co/news/business/2026-10-19-skyai-sells-off-entire-solana-treasury-launches-201-million-buyback-421037">reported</a> on Monday.
SOL is down about 8% since the end of September, while Bitcoin has edged higher, by CoinMarketCap's count. Altcoins also <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://coinmarketcap.com/academy/article/bitcoin-dominance-tops-60-altcoins-fall">lagged</a> Bitcoin last week.
<h2 id="header-3">What Do Trading Desks Need? Proximity to Block Builders</h2>
Faster finality helps merchants and exchanges that wait for a payment to clear before crediting it, Anza said. Trading firms compete on how close their orders sit to the validator building each block, which Nordnes said the upgrade leaves unchanged.
The economics of the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://coinmarketcap.com/academy/glossary/token">token</a> barely change. Nothing changes in how <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://coinmarketcap.com/academy/glossary/staking">staking</a> earns rewards, Galaxy <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.galaxy.com/insights/perspectives/alpenglow-what-we-learned-running-solanas-biggest-consensus-change">wrote</a>. Validators now burn a flat fee of about 0.8 SOL a day each, about 500 SOL a day across the network, a tiny fraction of supply, by CoinMarketCap's count.<tweet-embed url="https://x.com/galaxyhq/status/2112547854300410149"></tweet-embed>
Ethereum (<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/">ETH</a>) offers a precedent. It fell in the 30 days after four of its last five major upgrades, including a 13% drop after the Merge in 2022, by CoinMarketCap's count.
<h2 id="header-4">What Would Turn SOL Higher? ETF Inflows Returning</h2>
A return to inflows would show fund buyers coming back to the trade. The funds took in about $87 million on Sept. 25 alone, before October's run of withdrawals.
Fund holders have pulled about $64 million this month, and winning that back is the first test.
“For anyone building on or settling through Solana, the change that matters is not the headline number but how quickly a transaction becomes safe to rely on,” Galaxy's Solana engineers wrote on Tuesday.
Further Reading: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://coinmarketcap.com/academy/article/bitcoin-price-rises-tech-stocks-brent-dollar110">Bitcoin Price Tracks Tech Stocks Higher as Brent Holds Above $110</a>

Solana Price Rises with Bitcoin as Alpenglow Goes Live

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