Solana Announces Date for Next Big Upgrade

Solana Sets a Date for Its Next Major Upgrade

Solana has scheduled its upcoming Alpenglow upgrade to activate on mainnet in epoch 1064, which is expected to begin on Wednesday, October 21 at around 15:00 UTC, according to the Solana Foundation.

The change is a major overhaul of how Solana validators reach consensus. Alpenglow is designed to replace TowerBFT, the network’s current voting-based consensus mechanism, with a new approach that targets much faster transaction finality.

Finality refers to the point at which a transaction becomes effectively irreversible on-chain. Under TowerBFT, Solana’s finality is currently about 12.8 seconds. With Alpenglow, the target is approximately 150 milliseconds, which would make confirmations significantly closer to real-time.

Anza, a core development firm building on Solana, publicly confirmed the date on Oct. 13, 2026, describing the rollout as “18 months of work for a migration that happens in one slot.”

• Activation: Epoch 1064 (expected to start Oct. 21, ~15:00 UTC)
• Consensus change: TowerBFT is retired and replaced by Alpenglow’s new design
• Finality target: ~150ms, down from ~12.8 seconds

One visible side effect of the upgrade will be a change in how Solana’s transaction metrics appear. Under Alpenglow, vote transactions will be removed from blocks. That means Solana’s headline transaction counts and transactions-per-second figures are expected to drop sharply, even if underlying user activity does not change.

The Oct. 21 activation delivers only Votor, described as the first half of Alpenglow. A second component, Rotor—a replacement for Turbine, Solana’s system for broadcasting block data between validators—will come later and does not yet have a date.

Alpenglow has been in development for more than a year. The project was unveiled in May 2025, and in September 2025 Solana validators approved the associated governance proposal SIMD-0326 with 98.27% of votes cast in favor, with 52% of total network stake participating. In May 2026, Anza said it activated Alpenglow on a live community validator test cluster to validate the transition mechanics.

The upcoming mainnet activation is described as the largest change to Solana’s consensus mechanism since the network launched, focusing on reducing finality times and changing how validator voting is handled on-chain.