Solana has scheduled its major upgrade Alpenglow to go live on Wednesday, October 21, at the start of epoch 1064, around 15:00 UTC. The upgrade replaces the TowerBFT protocol and reduces transaction finality from 12.8 seconds to approximately 150 milliseconds, making SOL payments irreversible almost as quickly as optimistic confirmations. The Votor protocol included in Alpenglow moves votes off-chain, removes vote transactions from blocks, and will temporarily lower official TPS figures without any change in actual activity. Each vote account will require an additional 0.8 SOL to cover the new Validator Admission Ticket, a per-epoch fee that gets burned. Validators approved Alpenglow in September 2025 with 98.27% of votes, and the second half of the upgrade, called Rotor, has no launch date yet.
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