Solana completed its Alpenglow consensus handoff at slot 459,653,000 on Oct. 21, moving validator votes out of transaction blocks and changing how some dashboards measure network activity.
Anza announced that the upgrade’s genesis block formed at that slot and TowerBFT was retired. The Solana Foundation now marks Alpenglow as active on mainnet.
Under TowerBFT, each validator vote appeared in a block as a transaction. Alpenglow’s first phase, Votor, has validators exchange votes directly and uses certificates combining their signatures to record participation. Dashboards that included votes in transaction totals therefore need a new basis for comparisons across the handoff. A lower vote-inclusive count alone would not establish that users submitted fewer transactions, as earlier EconoTimes coverage of Solana’s activity measures explained. The upgrade leaves user transaction execution and submission fees unchanged.
Validator costs changed on a separate timetable. A burned charge of 0.8 Solana (SOL) each epoch now takes the place of fees charged on individual vote transactions. The Foundation said vote accounts were first assessed when epoch 1064 began, with that payment covering participation in epoch 1065.
Before the upgrade, the Foundation projected an Oct. 21 start for epoch 1064 at roughly 9:20 a.m. ET (13:20 UTC). The plan allowed TowerBFT to run for another 5,000 slots, an interval the Foundation put at about 18 minutes, before Votor took over.
The Foundation aims for Votor to finalize transactions in about 150 milliseconds, down from about 12.8 seconds with TowerBFT. A transaction reaches finality when the network considers it irreversible; the 150-millisecond figure remains a target. Rotor, a planned second phase with no release date, would change how block data travels through the network.
