[REVISION HISTORY]

Solana Alpenglow network upgrade

Updated 11 times since CLSTR started tracking revisions of this situation.

What changed

2026-10-22 11:36 UTC → 2026-10-22 16:07 UTC · added ~~removed~~

Solana has successfully activated its Alpenglow network upgrade on the mainnet, marking its most significant technical overhaul since its 2020 launch. The transition occurred during epoch 1064, with the handover recorded on-chain at slot 459,653,000. The upgrade replaces the long-standing TowerBFT consensus mechanism with a new protocol called Votor, developed by Anza in collaboration with researchers from ETH Zurich. A primary objective of Alpenglow is to drastically reduce transaction finality times from approximately 12.8 seconds to a target range of 100–150 milliseconds. While early mainnet observations showed finality at roughly 202 milliseconds, the upgrade represents a massive increase in speed for decentralized finance (DeFi), high-frequency trading, and blockchain-based payment applications. To achieve this, the upgrade moves validator voting off-chain. Instead of recording every vote as an individual transaction on the blockchain, validators now exchange BLS-signed messages directly with one another, which are then aggregated into digital certificates recorded in block footers. This change is intended to optimize block capacity and is expected to cause a sharp drop in headline transaction counts and transactions per second (TPS) figures, though real network activity is not expected to decrease. The Solana Foundation has advised data services and analytics providers to reset their TPS baselines accordingly. Additionally, the upgrade is expected to reduce validator operating costs by approximately 60%, moving from a variable cost of roughly 2 SOL per day to a fixed fee of approximately 0.8 SOL per 24-hour period. ~~The rollout involved several stages, including a transition from testnet to devnet in late September 2026 and a clarification from Anza that certain scheduled dates referred~~ To participate, validators must upgrade to ~~feature gate activations rather than~~ the ~~final mainnet launch.~~ Agave 4.3.2 client.

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