Solana Nears Alpenglow Migration Boundary at Slot 459,653,000

Solana is approaching its scheduled Alpenglow consensus migration Wednesday, which would remove validator votes from blocks and could lower transaction totals displayed by dashboards that count them.

Epoch 1064 is estimated to begin Oct. 21 at about 9:20 a.m. ET (13:20 UTC). The network will continue using TowerBFT for the epoch’s first 5,000 slots, an estimated 18 minutes. The migration boundary is slot 459,653,000. The clock estimate may shift as slot timing changes.

Alpenglow’s first phase, Votor, changes how validators agree on blocks. Under TowerBFT, validators record individual votes as transactions in blocks. Votor instead has them exchange votes directly and combine signatures into certificates. Those certificates provide a record of participation after individual vote transactions leave blocks.

Dashboards that include validator votes in their transaction totals will need a new basis for comparing activity across the upgrade. A lower total or transactions-per-second figure after the switch would not, by itself, mean fewer user transactions. Alpenglow does not change how user transactions execute or what users pay to submit them.

Votor is designed to bring transaction finality to about 150 milliseconds, compared with about 12.8 seconds under TowerBFT. Finality is the point at which the network treats a transaction as irreversible. The faster figure remains a protocol target, rather than a result established on mainnet.

Validator costs will change separately. A burned charge of 0.8 Solana (SOL) per epoch, paid from vote accounts, will replace fees for individual vote transactions. Validators pay one epoch ahead: the first charge in epoch 1064 covers participation in epoch 1065.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko suggested that changing the vote program could have cut Alpenglow’s development time in half. A later Alpenglow phase, Rotor, is planned to change how block data moves through the network, but has no scheduled release date. For now, the next step is the expected start of epoch 1064, followed by the 5,000-slot period before the migration boundary.