Solana Alpenglow Upgrade to Activate Tonight at Epoch 1064 on Mainnet

October 21 – According to CoinDesk, Solana will activate the Alpenglow upgrade on Wednesday at epoch 1064, its largest network change since 2020. The upgrade moves validator voting off-chain and aggregates votes into certificates, aiming to cut transaction finality time from roughly 6 seconds to about 150 milliseconds. Validators' current voting fees of about 2 SOL per day will be replaced by an admission fee of 0.8 SOL per epoch (about 24 hours), reducing costs by roughly 60%. According to Galaxy Digital, the testnet has been restarted 6 times since early May, including one failed migration that was rolled back.

Earlier report: Solana Alpenglow upgrade to go live on mainnet on October 21, cutting finality time to about 150 milliseconds.