Alpenglow is live on Solana mainnet
Alpenglow replaced TowerBFT on Solana mainnet on October 21, 2026. Finality now targets around 150ms.
Alpenglow is now Solana's consensus protocol. It went live on mainnet in epoch 1064 on October 21, 2026. The feature gate turned on at about 13:36 UTC. The network ran TowerBFT for 5,000 more slots, about 18 minutes, and then handed off to Alpenglow. Finality now targets around 150ms, down from about 12.8 seconds under TowerBFT.
What changed
Under TowerBFT, validators voted by sending transactions. Under Alpenglow, its voting layer Votor has validators send votes to each other and bundle them into certificates. A block is final after one or two rounds of voting. The Solana Foundation reports that 446 of 654 validators signed the genesis certificate.
- Vote transactions no longer land in blocks. Transaction counts and TPS dashboards dropped, but real activity did not.
- Each voting validator now pays a flat 0.8 SOL per epoch from its vote account. This fee is called the Validator Admission Ticket (VAT), and it is burned. It replaces vote transaction fees of about 1 SOL per epoch.
- Execution did not change. Wallets, programs and transaction fees work as before.
- Rotor, the second phase, will replace Turbine later. It has no date yet.
Why it matters for stakers and institutions
Faster finality means a transfer or trade settles in under a second. That helps payments and exchange flows. For stakers, the validator must keep its vote account funded every epoch. If the fee is not paid, the validator does not vote or produce blocks in the next epoch, and delegators lose that epoch's rewards. Ask your provider how it funds the VAT.
stakefish runs Solana validators for retail and institutional stakers. Read our Alpenglow explainer for institutional stakers, or learn about Solana staking with stakefish.
