# Solana Expects Alpenglow Rollout to Target 150-Millisecond Finality

By Simon Yoon

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/32587
Published: 2026-10-15T15:26:38.000Z
Updated: 2026-10-15T15:26:38.000Z
Section: Technology

> Epoch 1064 is expected to begin Oct. 21. TowerBFT is expected to remain in control for about 18 minutes before Votor takes over.

Solana expects epoch 1064, the opening marker for its Alpenglow mainnet rollout, to begin Wednesday, Oct. 21, around 11 a.m. ET. The estimated UTC start times span 14:50 to 15:00 as the network prepares to move toward a consensus process designed for faster transaction finality.

Alpenglow targets finality of roughly 150 milliseconds, compared with about 12.8 seconds under the current system. The estimate comes from simulations that used the current mainnet stake distribution and did not account for computation overhead. It is a target rather than a measured mainnet result, and latency can vary with stake distribution.

The epoch boundary will not trigger an immediate handover. TowerBFT is expected to stay in charge for about 5,000 slots, or roughly 18 minutes, after epoch 1064 begins. Votor, Alpenglow’s first phase, is then expected to take over consensus.

Votor replaces validator vote transactions in blocks with messages sent among validators and certificates that combine votes. Its one-round path uses an 80% stake threshold; its two-round path uses 60% thresholds. The design’s “20+20” model is built to tolerate up to 20% adversarial stake alongside another 20% that does not respond.

Removing vote transactions from blocks will change how network activity appears in transaction and transactions-per-second totals. Those figures may fall even if user activity remains steady, while transaction execution and fee rules stay the same.

Finality describes when consensus treats a transaction as settled; it is different from block cadence. Solana separately completed a four-stage reduction in slot time during October, lowering it from 400 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds.

The rollout is the next stage in Solana’s Alpenglow mainnet plan. A later block-data dissemination change called Rotor has no scheduled activation date.