Solana activates Alpenglow upgrade on mainnet, reducing transaction finality to 150ms

Solana will activate the Alpenglow upgrade in epoch 1064 on Wednesday, October 21, at approximately 15:00 UTC. This upgrade replaces TowerBFT with the Votor protocol, aiming to reduce transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. While ordinary users do not need to take action, developers will see 'confirmed' and 'finalized' commitment levels become the same, and validators must pay a new Validator Admission Ticket of 0.8 SOL per epoch.