Solana News Today: Alpenglow Hits Testnet as SOL Presses Against $120

Solana news today comes from two directions at once. SOL trades around $118, up about 1.3% on the day, while developers test an upgrade that could make transactions final in less time than a blink. Underneath both stories, a presale is drawing attention from traders who feel they missed this week’s move. More on that below.

Developers have deployed Alpenglow to Solana’s public testnet. The upgrade aims to cut finality, the point at which a transaction can no longer be reversed, from about 13 seconds to roughly 0.15 seconds.

The core change is a new consensus protocol called Votor, which replaces the current TowerBFT system. Instead of stacking votes across 32 slots, validators vote directly with one another and settle blocks in one or two rounds. Anza, the team behind Solana’s Agave client, confirmed that validators need version 4.3 to take part.

The move follows four months of testing on a dedicated network. This public testnet phase is the real stress test: it shows whether the wider validator set can migrate without breaking anything.

BREAKING: Alpenglow, @Solana’s biggest consensus upgrade in history, is moving into its testnet phase this week.

The upgrade lands in a market that’s already moving. SOL has gained roughly 23% over the past week, and it now sits directly beneath a zone that has capped price before.

On the daily chart, SOL is testing $118.60, a former support level that turned into resistance after the February breakdown, with the psychological $120 mark just above. The token has also reclaimed its 200-day EMA near $93 for the first time in months, a shift that often signals a change in trend.

Demand appears to be real. Spot-linked products reportedly drew more than $28 million in inflows as SOL broke above $110 earlier this week. However, the four-hour RSI near 71 shows strong momentum that is also stretched, which raises the odds of short-term profit-taking.

BREAKING: The number of weekly spot DEX trades on Solana has officially surpassed the NYSE for the first time in history.

This metric includes the number of individual onchain token swaps executed on decentralized exchanges built on Solana.

Price isn’t the only thing surging in Solana news today. For the first time, the number of weekly spot trades on Solana’s decentralized exchanges has passed the New York Stock Exchange, according to The Kobeissi Letter, which cites Blockworks data.

In the week ending September 13, Solana handled about 208 million onchain token swaps, compared with roughly 190 million trades on the NYSE. The gap with Nasdaq also narrowed to about 47 million trades, the smallest on record.

Jupiter, Solana’s largest trading platform, drove much of that growth. It has processed more than 80 million trades so far this month, up 38% from last month. Overall, weekly spot DEX trades on Solana have climbed about 185% from their July lows.

One caveat: this compares the number of trades, not dollar volume. A typical Solana swap is much smaller than a typical NYSE trade. Even so, it shows how much real trading activity is moving onchain, and why Alpenglow’s faster finality matters.

LiquidChain is a Layer 3 infrastructure project that combines liquidity from Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana into a single execution environment. Its pitch to developers is simple: deploy once and access all three ecosystems, instead of building and maintaining separate integrations for each.

The $LIQUID presale has raised $971,680.17 so far, with tokens priced at $0.014958. For traders who see cross-chain liquidity as the next infrastructure narrative, this is an early-stage entry point, before any exchange listing sets a market price.

The presale platform accepts multiple funding options, including ETH, BNB, SOL, USDT, USDC, and BTC, alongside direct bank card purchases for those buying with fiat. Staking is enabled at the time of purchase, offering the current 1,178% APY.

Anyone considering the liquidity thesis should review LiquidChain’s documentation, tokenomics, and team directly, and only commit capital they can afford to lose.

To stay updated on upcoming presale stages, exchange listings, and technical milestones, users can follow LiquidChain on X and join the project’s Telegram channel.

Established in 2013, 99Bitcoin’s team members have been crypto experts since Bitcoin’s Early days.

Alex is a seasoned cryptocurrency trader and market analyst with over seven years of active experience in the digital asset space. Since entering the markets in 2017, Alex has specialized in identifying emerging "meta" trends and high-volatility narratives. Notably, Alex... Read More