# Solana (SOL) Activates Alpenglow as Price Falls 11.9% From Oct. 5 Close

By Simon Yoon

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/37151
Published: 2026-10-21T23:23:29.000Z
Updated: 2026-10-21T23:23:29.000Z
Section: Technology

> The switch took effect at slot 459,653,000 on Oct. 21. SOL closed at $106.39 on Oct. 20 UTC, while U.S. spot Solana funds had $9.3 million in net withdrawals over two sessions.

Solana (SOL) activated Alpenglow on its mainnet Oct. 21, replacing TowerBFT with a protocol designed to speed transaction finality as the token’s Oct. 20 close stood 11.9% below Oct. 5.

The handoff took effect at slot 459,653,000 at about 10 a.m. ET (14:00 UTC), roughly 24 minutes after epoch 1064 began at 9:36 a.m. ET (13:36 UTC).

Alpenglow targets finality—the point when a transaction is treated as irreversible—in roughly 150 milliseconds. That figure is a design target, rather than a measure of sustained performance after the mainnet switch. The 12.8-second comparison with TowerBFT uses the older 400-millisecond slot schedule. Solana reduced its target slot time to 200 milliseconds on Oct. 9; under that schedule, TowerBFT finality was estimated at about six seconds.

Alpenglow’s first phase, Votor, moves validator votes off-chain and combines them into certificates. Because validator votes no longer appear as transactions in blocks, raw transaction counts before and after the change may not track user activity on a like-for-like basis.

SOL closed at $106.39 for the Oct. 20 UTC date, compared with $120.76 on Oct. 5. U.S. spot Solana funds had net withdrawals of $6.7 million on Oct. 19 and $2.6 million on Oct. 20. Net withdrawals also occurred in each of the 12 trading sessions from Oct. 5 through Oct. 20.

SkyAI had sold all its SOL by Oct. 16 and held about $223.8 million in cash. The sale and fund withdrawals provide market context but do not establish what drove SOL’s October decline. The upgrade changes Solana’s consensus design, while observed network performance, fund flows and broader market conditions remain separate factors relevant to the token’s price.