Solana Sets a Date for Its Next Major Upgrade

Solana has locked in October 21 for Alpenglow, a full replacement of the system its validators use to reach consensus. The switch is tied to epoch 1064, which the Solana Foundation expects to begin around 15:00 UTC that Wednesday. Alpenglow retires TowerBFT, the current system the network uses, and aims to make transactions final in roughly 150 milliseconds. Finality is the moment a transaction becomes irreversible, and under TowerBFT that currently takes about 12.8 seconds. On Solana today, a payment is confirmed pretty quickly, but that’s not a guarantee.