Solana to Launch Alpenglow Upgrade on October 21, Reducing Transaction Finality to About 150 Milliseconds

Odaily News: The public chain Solana will launch the Alpenglow upgrade on its mainnet at approximately 15:00 (UTC) on October 21, completely replacing its validator consensus system. The upgrade will phase out TowerBFT, with the goal of reducing transaction finality from the current approximately 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds.

Alpenglow adopts Votor, which moves vote transactions out of blocks, allowing validators to communicate directly and generate certificates; final confirmation can be achieved in the first round with 80% or more stake support, while support rates between 60% and 80% will enter a second round of voting.

After the upgrade, vote transactions will no longer be counted in blocks, and Solana's public transaction count and TPS will drop significantly, but actual activity will not decrease as a result. Ordinary users do not need to take any action, and the Solana Virtual Machine, transaction format, programs, and fees will all remain unchanged.

The feature switch will be activated at epoch 1064, and TowerBFT will continue to run for approximately 5,000 slots, or about 18 minutes, after which Alpenglow will take over. Each vote account will need to pay an additional validator admission fee of 0.8 SOL, which will be burned; the launch date of the Rotor upgrade has not yet been announced. (Decrypt)