Solana activates Alpenglow mainnet upgrade

Solana activated Alpenglow on mainnet on Oct. 21, its biggest network overhaul since 2020, replacing TowerBFT voting with certificate-based consensus (Votor). Validators now send votes directly and combine them into certificates, letting blocks become final after one or two rounds — targeting settlement in about 150 milliseconds, down from a multi-second wait.

Users keep their existing wallets; transaction fees and apps are unchanged. Exchanges can credit deposits sooner and merchants can treat stablecoin payments as settled without making customers wait — though 150ms remains a target under normal conditions, and some systems receive finality information later than voting validators.

One visible side effect: validator votes no longer count as blockchain transactions, so network dashboards will report sharply lower transaction totals even if user activity is flat. The handover from the old system took about 900ms, with 446 of 654 participating validators certifying the starting block.