Overview
- Solana activated the Alpenglow upgrade on Wednesday, Oct. 21, with the change tied to epoch 1064 and a 5,000‑slot transition that targets slot 459,653,000.
- Alpenglow replaces TowerBFT with Votor, which aggregates BLS signatures into compact certificates and aims to reach finality in about 150 milliseconds though delivery to non‑admitted nodes can lag.
- Validators must run Agave‑based clients at version 4.3.2, register BLS keys, and keep 0.8 SOL in vote accounts to pay a burned Validator Admission Ticket each epoch, with the admitted set capped at 2,000 by stake weight.
- A readiness snapshot taken the day before the switch flagged 151 validators holding roughly 20.3% of stake as unprepared and providers warned of brief pauses, node errors, or RPC/data‑stream interruptions during the handoff.
- Ecosystem tooling will change immediately because vote transactions no longer appear in blocks, forcing explorers and indexers to read certificate data from block footers and likely lowering reported TPS even if user activity stays the same.