Overview
- Validators completed a coordinated 5,000-slot transition and activated Alpenglow on mainnet-beta at slot 459,653,000 during epoch 1064 on Wednesday, switching the network from TowerBFT to the new Votor protocol.
- Under Votor, validators exchange votes off-chain and combine them into compact BLS certificates so a block can reach finality in roughly 150 milliseconds instead of the network’s prior multi-second window.
- A readiness snapshot before the handoff showed 151 validators controlling about 20.3% of stake were not fully prepared, and operators needed Agave 4.3.2 or compatible clients, registered BLS keys, and at least 0.8 SOL in vote accounts for the new Validator Admission Ticket.
- Providers warned of brief pauses in transaction inclusion and possible RPC or data-stream delays during the handoff, and indexers and explorers must rebaseline TPS and transaction counts because vote transactions no longer appear on-chain.
- Faster finality could let exchanges and payment processors treat transfers as irreversible much sooner, and teams are watching live performance as further upgrades such as Rotor and Quantumglow remain planned for later implementation.