Solana activates Alpenglow, targeting 150 ms finality in place of TowerBFT
Solana switched its consensus to Votor at slot 459,653,000 on October 21, aiming to cut finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds.
ALTCOINS
Daniel Hartley
10/21/20261 min read
Solana activated its Alpenglow consensus upgrade on mainnet on Wednesday, October 21, according to core developer Anza. The switch took place at slot 459,653,000 in epoch 1064, after 446 of 654 validators certified the genesis block. Validators retired TowerBFT, the consensus protocol Solana had used since launch, without moving activity to a separate chain.
The release delivers only Votor, the new voting component. Anza says it cuts the path to finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds, a design target rather than an independently measured latency. A block finalizes in one round with at least 80% stake support, while support between 60% and 80% triggers a second round. Rotor, the planned replacement for Turbine, has no release date.
Vote transactions no longer sit inside blocks, so headline transaction counts and TPS figures will fall without any real drop in activity. Validators now burn a Validator Admission Ticket of 0.8 SOL per vote account per epoch, replacing roughly 1 SOL per epoch previously spent on vote fees. Transaction execution, program behavior and fees are unchanged, and ordinary users do not need to take any action.
The change was approved through SIMD-0326 in September 2025 with 98.27% of votes in favor. Anza lists geographically aware leader rotation and Quantumglow, a post-quantum research design, as future work without committed dates. In May, Anza's Max Resnick had pointed to a late third-quarter or early fourth-quarter mainnet activation.
Source: NewsBTC, crypto.news, Decrypt.