Morning Minute: Solana Is About To Get Faster

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our daily news show 'FOMO HOUR' covering all of the top stories and market action.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors fall 3-5% after hot CPI; BTC at $80.9k
• Over $900M liquidated as crypto majors selloff; alts down 5-15%
• Solana sets Oct 21 for Alpenglow on mainnet
• Papertrade flips Circle in daily revenue with $7.5M
• Kalshi says state-level oversight would drive prediction markets offshore

🏎️ Solana Cuts Finality From 12.8 Seconds to 150 Milliseconds

Next Wednesday, Solana rips out the engine and drops in a new one while the car is doing 70 on the highway.

On October 21, around 15:00 UTC, Solana activates Alpenglow on mainnet, retiring the consensus mechanism it has run on since launch. Finality drops from roughly 12.8 seconds to a target of about 150 milliseconds – 85 times faster. Anza, the core dev shop behind it, called it “18 months of work for a migration that happens in one slot.”

Finality is the moment a transaction stops being reversible, the point where you can hand over the goods knowing the payment can’t be clawed back. Solana has always felt instant, but there was a roughly 13-second window where a block could in theory still get dropped. Every exchange and payment processor has had to build around that window. Next week it closes.

The old system breaks if more than about a third of staked SOL turns hostile. The new one is built to survive 20% of stake acting maliciously plus another 20% simply offline, and keep finalizing. For a chain whose reputation was built on outages, that’s the number institutions will actually care about.

Now the part that’s going to cause trouble. Validators currently cast their votes as transactions on the chain. Under Alpenglow they vote directly to each other instead, which means Solana’s headline transaction count and TPS figures are about to fall off a cliff. Nothing real changes - same users, same volume, same apps - but the number everyone has quoted for years was mostly validators voting at each other. Expect a wave of “Solana activity collapses” posts next Wednesday from people reading a dashboard.

This is also just phase one of two, and the second piece has no date yet. And Solana has missed an Alpenglow date before - a September 28 activation was announced, then pushed. So, grains of salt.

But clearly Solana is focused on speed as one of its primary differentiators - and it’s about to get a lot faster…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are very red after CPI sent rate hike odds higher; BTC -3% at $80.9k; ETH -6% at $2,360; SOL -5% at $102; HYPE -3% at $79; ZEC -12% at $1,090
• Top alt movers include PYTH (+3%) and CRV (+4%)
• Oil -1% at $95; Gold +0.2% at $4,180
• Stock futures are mixed ahead of PPI; DOW +0.3%, Nasdaq -1.1%
• Over $900M in crypto longs were liquidated over the past 24 hours, led by ETH and BTC
• Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan told Bloomberg that U.S. regulators should police the firms building on his blockchain rather than the network itself, arguing “the deployers are the ones that exercise these controls”
• Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said state-led oversight would drive prediction markets offshore, telling DC Fintech Week the court fight is “a choice of whether prediction markets exist in the U.S. or whether they go offshore”
• HEX founder Richard Heart was detained in Istanbul on an Interpol Red Notice that Finland requested in 2024 over aggravated tax fraud
• Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, won approval to trade crypto for its 110 million retail clients, with a December 1 launch planned covering Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT
• The European Banking Authority designated Circle’s USDC as the EU’s first “significant” e-money token under MiCA, the only one of 45 notified tokens to clear the bar, which puts it under direct EBA supervision of its reserves, capital and liquidity from November 12

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

• The Bitcoin ETFs saw $261M in net outflows on Wednesday; the ETH ETFs saw $130M in outflows

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were red down 3-5%; DOGE -5%, SHIB -3%, PEPE -6%, PENGU -5%, TRUMP -3%, SPX -4%, BONK -5%
• Robinhood chain leaders were red down 5-20% reversing their recent gains; Pons -6% to $212M; AI -20% at $80M; Cashcat -18% at $100M; VRAX +40% and Wolfpack +55% led top movers
• Solana top movers included Dope +100%, Stream +9000%, Nihilism +1200% and Pepper +90%

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• Papertrade flipped Circle in revenue with $7.5M, highest of all onchain protocols; Hyperliquid was next with $2.64M, then Pump.fun with $2.04M
• Polygon Labs closed its acquisition of Coinme, picking up 37 state money transmitter licenses, 11 exemptions and FinCEN registration to cover 48 states, and turning its Open Money Stack into a licensed U.S. payments rail

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mostly flat; Punks even at 31.2 ETH, BAYC -1% at 5.45 ETH, Pudgy +2% at 2.42 ETH
• Yield Field Deeds (+10%), aligndraw (+38%) and Robinpunks (+230%) led top movers