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Solana getting “new heart” in biggest upgrade ever

The Alpenglow upgrade revamps solana’s consensus engine to decrease transaction finality from 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds, bringing the blockchain network closer to its goal of being an on-chain Nasdaq.

Sage D. Young

9/8/25 9:10AM

Solana is gearing up for its biggest upgrade ever.

Last week, community members voted overwhelmingly in favor of Alpenglow (aka SIMD-0326) to implement a new consensus mechanism for the solana blockchain. Of those who participated in the governance process, 98.3% approved the upgrade, 1% voted against, and the remaining abstained, a solana vote tracker shows.

“Changing the consensus mechanism for a live blockchain is like a heart transplant during a marathon (or sprint, in solana’s case),” explained Rafal Klich, a research analyst for institutional staking provider Chorus One. “The chain will have a ‘new heart’ designed to meet the demands of internet capital markets,” Klich said to Sherwood News.

Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood, “The way I think about Alpenglow is switching out a good engine with an even better, more nimble one.”

He added, “Taking apart your entire chain’s consensus for the sake of improvement is quite amazing, especially considering the size and activity solana facilitates today.”

Solana’s decentralized exchange trading volume reached about $693 billion in the first half of the year, making it the top network by the metric, outpacing ethereum, bitcoin, tron, and avalanche, per data pulled from blockchain analytics firms Artemis and DefiLlama.

DEX volume for various blockchains by each quarter (Credit: Artemis)

Kairos Research, which runs a solana validator, voted in favor of Alpenglow. Unsworth explained, “We view it as a pragmatic approach to rethinking solana’s consensus, which ultimately results in faster finality and potentially stronger liveness.”

Decreasing transaction finality to 150 milliseconds

The upgrade is expected to reduce the network’s transaction finality, the time when a transaction is recorded on a blockchain and after which it cannot be modified.

Pre-Alpenglow, a transaction finalizes on the blockchain in about 12.8 seconds, but post-Alpenglow, the time would be cut to 150 milliseconds, putting solana into direct contention with centralized exchanges in terms of speed, said Jon Rotbard, an investor at venture capital firm CoinFund.

This brings solana “potentially in striking distance of supporting the vision of a chain for executing and settling ‘everything’ on the L1 (payments, trading, capital formation, etc.),” Rotbard argued.

Alpenglow allows solana to take a step closer to its goal of being an on-chain Nasdaq by introducing a new resilience model that allows the network to maintain operations even if 20% of its validators are malicious and an additional 20% are offline, Klich said.

“Alpenglow brings consensus latency to a level comparable with Web2 applications while strengthening the system’s security posture, scalability, and economic fairness,” the proposal stated.

Benefiting users

The upgrade is expected to benefit all users, including retail, advanced traders, market makers, and financial applications. With 150-millisecond finality, solana is closer to institutional-grade trading, opening the door for central limit order books and tighter spreads, Chorus One’s Klich predicts. The biggest gain should accrue to various financial applications, though.

Decentralized finance protocols “become safer, since liquidations and oracle updates can happen in near real time, reducing the risk of bad loans,” Klich continued. “Beyond trading and DeFi, payments may become more viable as near instant finality makes solana more attractive for payment applications.”

Roger Wattenhofer, head of research at solana development firm Anza, told Sherwood, “Pretty much anything that needs a fast finality will be possible with Alpenglow.”

Unsworth noted that end users won’t notice a substantial difference outside of improved reliability. “As a user, you tend to remember when things didn’t work more than they do — so this should just lead to more slightly better, more consistent user experiences,” he added.

The upgrade comes in the same year that the network’s native cryptocurrency reached an all-time high of $292.

Even though Alpenglow is the blockchain’s most substantial technical change in its history, Unsworth doesn’t think the upgrade will change the way investors underwrite solana as an investment.

“The larger things to watch that I think will impact price action will be DATs [digital asset treasuries] which have been announced. I know there is an open question around how much of those are in-kind contributions vs. fresh capital which will purchase SOL on the open market,” Unsworth said to Sherwood.

The second big-ticket item are exchange-traded funds. Even though the only two cryptocurrencies to have ETFs in the US are bitcoin and ethereum, the US Securities and Exchange Commission is currently reviewing several spot solana ETFs. (There’s already a solana ETF in Canada).

On August 30, Bloomberg Intelligence ETF analyst James Seyffart said a number of updated solana ETF filings were sent to the SEC, including ones from VanEck, Grayscale, Fidelity, CoinShares, and Bitwise.

Sage D. Young6/16/26

Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/16/26

Bitcoin is “caught between flow deterioration and macro relief”

Sage D. Young6/15/26

Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Ethereum has increased more than 9% to trade above $1,800, amid BitMine Immersion Technologies acquiring $139.2 million worth of ethereum.
XRP and solana have rebounded from multiyear lows, each rising roughly 10%.
HYPE has bounced up 12%.
Dog-based memecoins dogecoin and shiba inu have chased gains of more than 4%.

“Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets,” Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were “very oversold” following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. “Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.”

“Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop that’s stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/15/26

Bitcoin hits highest level in 2 weeks following news of Iran deal

Bitcoin crossed $66,500 Monday morning as the broad crypto market welcomed the return of a risk-on mood.