Solana (SOL) validators face a 0.8 SOL charge for each epoch under Alpenglow, shifting the cost of consensus participation to vote accounts as fees on individual vote transactions end.
The Solana Foundation said the charge is burned. Vote accounts incurred the first payment when epoch 1064 opened Oct. 21; it applied to participation in epoch 1065. A validator without enough funds in its vote account cannot vote or produce blocks in that following epoch and earns no rewards for it.
The fee change accompanies the Alpenglow consensus transition. Under its Votor phase, certificates record validator participation after votes are exchanged outside transaction blocks. That removes the individual vote transactions on which the previous fee system was based.
The change can also affect reported network activity. Dashboards that included validator votes in transaction totals may show a decline even if user-submitted activity holds steady. It does not alter how user transactions are executed or the fees users pay to submit them.
The Foundation has set a target of about 150 milliseconds for transaction finality under Votor, compared with roughly 12.8 seconds under TowerBFT. The faster figure is a target, not a measured result. No release date has been set for Rotor, the later Alpenglow phase focused on block distribution.
