Solana sets October 21 for massive Alpenglow upgrade that could make transactions 99% faster to finalize
Solana plans to activate Alpenglow on mainnet on Oct. 21, replacing its TowerBFT consensus system with Votor. The upgrade targets transaction finality of about 150 milliseconds, down from roughly 12.8 seconds, by letting validators exchange votes directly and combine them into certificates. This could speed settlement for payments, trading and tokenized assets, while leaving transaction execution and applications largely unchanged. The target is not yet proven on mainnet and actual performance will depend on network conditions and validator participation. Migration requires validators representing at least 82% of staked SOL to approve a genesis certificate; transactions will briefly pause during the handover. Validators must use Agave 4.3.0 and meet a participation-fee balance requirement. Testnet and devnet deployments have completed, but the mainnet activation will be the first live test.
