Solana developer Anza has set Oct. 21 for the mainnet migration to Alpenglow, a consensus system built to cut finality to roughly 150 milliseconds. Validators and data providers must change their software before the switch.
Anza has scheduled Alpenglow's mainnet-beta migration for Wednesday, Oct. 21, at about 10:50 a.m. ET. The upgrade replaces TowerBFT with a system designed to finalize transactions in roughly 150 milliseconds.
The Solana Foundation's upgrade guide compares that target with about 12.8 seconds under TowerBFT. Finality is the point at which a transaction can no longer be reversed, not the interval between new blocks.
How the handoff works
Alpenglow's Votor protocol replaces votes submitted as onchain transactions with messages sent directly between validators. Blocks become final after one or two voting rounds, and user transaction execution and fees stay unchanged.
The migration plan says the feature gate activates at an epoch boundary. 5,000 slots later, blocks temporarily carry only votes, and validators then establish a genesis certificate backed by 82% of stake. In its Oct. 13 announcement, Anza described "a migration that happens in one slot."
What operators need to change
Validators must run an Agave 4.3.0-based client before activation, the Foundation says, and Firedancer and Frankendancer are not supported during the migration. Operators also need at least 0.8 SOL above the rent-exempt minimum in their vote accounts to pay a new per-epoch admission fee.
Developers should detect the migration through the new getAgGenesisCert RPC method rather than a calendar date. It returns null under TowerBFT and a genesis certificate once the network has migrated.
SOL trades near $108
Solana traded at $107.77 on Oct. 13 after recovering from an intraday low of $101.69, according to crypto.news.
Sources: The Defiant, crypto.news
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