Solana: Small technical steps towards the big Alpenglow jump

A week of small steps before the big leap. On August 17, Solana launched the activation of Agave 4.2, the new version of the validator client supported by Anza. Three technical projects are starting in parallel: the block time goes from 400 to 200 milliseconds, the cost of on-chain storage drops by 90%, and the maximum size of a transaction more than triples. Nothing spectacular taken in isolation, but everything is calibrated to prepare for the arrival of Alpenglow, the most ambitious consensus change in the history of the network. [...]