Solana to launch Alpenglow upgrade on October 21

Solana is scheduled to activate a major infrastructure upgrade known as Alpenglow on October 21, starting with epoch 1064 at approximately 15:00 UTC. The upgrade aims to drastically reduce transaction finality times from the current 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds.

To achieve this, the network will replace its existing consensus mechanism, TowerBFT, with a new system called Votor. Unlike the current method where validators submit votes as on-chain transactions, Votor allows validators to exchange votes directly and combine them into cryptographic certificates. This off-chain voting process enables blocks to become final after only one or two rounds of voting.

While the upgrade is expected to cause a sharp drop in headline transaction counts and transactions per second (TPS) figures because vote transactions will no longer be recorded on-chain, real network activity is not expected to decrease. The faster settlement is intended to benefit financial applications, payment providers, and trading platforms that require near-instantaneous, irreversible transaction confirmation.