Operators of Solana transaction dashboards face a measurement break when Wednesday’s Alpenglow upgrade moves validator voting out of block transactions, potentially lowering published rates even if user activity holds steady.
The Solana Foundation now estimates that epoch 1064, the activation boundary, will begin Oct. 21 at about 9:20 a.m. ET (13:20 UTC). That is earlier than the 11 a.m. ET (15:00 UTC) estimate in earlier coverage of the upgrade. The estimate may shift with the network’s slot timing. TowerBFT is expected to remain in use for another 5,000 slots, or about 18 minutes, after the epoch begins.
TowerBFT votes currently appear in blocks as transactions. Alpenglow’s Votor system will carry votes between validators and assemble the results into certificates. Once those votes leave block transaction records, dashboards that include them in their totals will need a new baseline. A lower transactions-per-second reading would not, by itself, establish that users had submitted fewer transactions or that network capacity had fallen.
Services that rely on transactions to track validator participation also face a change. The voting record will be in certificates stored in block footers, the Foundation says. Yellowstone’s gRPC footer message does not forward those certificates, so that feed alone cannot provide the new record.
For users, the Foundation says transaction execution, formats and fee mechanics will stay the same. Alpenglow targets finality of about 150 milliseconds, compared with roughly 12.8 seconds under TowerBFT. Finality describes when a transaction is considered settled; the faster figure remains a target until the upgraded system runs on the main network.
The next milestones are the start of epoch 1064 and the consensus handoff roughly 5,000 slots later. After the handoff, observers can measure actual finality and compare transaction rates on a basis that excludes validator votes. The Foundation says operators can use getAgGenesisCert to check whether the migration has occurred.
