Solana will activate its Alpenglow upgrade on 21 October, with the network aiming to reduce transaction finality to about 150 milliseconds.
The target will depend on network conditions, but the upgrade is designed to replace Solana’s existing TowerBFT validator voting system and move validator votes off-chain.
As part of the change, vote transactions will no longer be included in blocks. That could significantly reduce Solana’s reported transaction totals, even if the level of activity from users remains unchanged.
The change means headline transaction figures may no longer provide a direct comparison with previous totals, because they will not include the same validator vote transactions as before. A fall in the reported count would therefore not necessarily indicate a decline in network use.
Validators taking part in the migration must run Agave 4.3.0. Operators using Firedancer and Frankendancer will also have to change their software temporarily as the upgrade is introduced.
Alpenglow’s central aim is to accelerate the time taken for transactions to reach finality, while changing how consensus-related voting is handled across the Solana network. Actual performance after the upgrade will depend on prevailing network conditions.
