Overview
- Solana scheduled Alpenglow to go live at the start of epoch 1064 on Wednesday, Oct. 21, replacing the on-chain TowerBFT voting system with Anza’s Votor design.
- The upgrade shifts vote messages off-chain into certificates that can finalize blocks in one or two rounds and targets roughly 150 milliseconds of irreversible settlement under normal network conditions.
- Validators had to run compatible clients such as Agave 4.3.2, Jito-Solana or Harmonic Salsa and keep at least 0.8 SOL in vote accounts to purchase a Validator Admission Ticket before the migration.
- Node operators and RPC/indexer providers warned that the consensus handoff could cause a brief pause in new transactions and temporary data-stream or finality-reporting delays for unstaked or default-path nodes.
- The change will reduce validator vote fee overhead and alter how explorers and dashboards count transactions, and it follows months of testing, a September 2025 governance vote, and several devnet/testnet migrations.