Overview
- Solana will activate the first phase of Alpenglow (Votor) on mainnet in epoch 1064 on October 21, with the network switching from TowerBFT roughly 5,000 slots — about 18 minutes — after the epoch begins.
- Votor moves validator votes off-chain into aggregated certificates so blocks can finalize after one or two voting rounds, a design that targets transaction finality near 150 milliseconds but whose real-world speed will depend on live network conditions.
- Vote transactions will be removed from blocks, which will sharply reduce Solana’s headline transaction counts and TPS even if user activity stays the same, so explorers and analytics providers are instructed to re-baseline metrics and track non-vote measures instead.
- Validators must run Agave 4.3.0 for the migration and alternative clients like Firedancer and Frankendancer will need temporary client changes; each vote account also needs a burned 0.8 SOL Validator Admission Ticket per epoch or the validator will be excluded from voting.
- The October 21 rollout covers only Votor; Rotor, the planned replacement for Solana’s Turbine block-propagation system, remains a later release with no mainnet date, and ordinary wallet users should see no change to transaction formats or fees.