Crypto

Solana's Alpenglow is live, and its transaction count just shrank by design

Solana swapped consensus systems on its live network Wednesday, targeting 150-millisecond finality. Vote transactions left the chain, so headline transaction counts dropped.

By Jennifer Walsh · Oct 21, 2026, 5:40 PM EDT · Updated Oct 22, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

For information only, not investment advice. Prices delayed.

Tickers: SOL

Solana ($SOL) has swapped its consensus engine on a running network. Alpenglow is live on mainnet, Solana's upgrade page says, after activating at the start of epoch 1064 on Wednesday, around 13:36 UTC (9:36 a.m. ET). The old TowerBFT system ran about 18 more minutes, then slot 459,652,999 became Alpenglow's genesis block, with a handoff of about 900 milliseconds. Core developer Anza posted at 13:54 UTC that "the legacy TowerBFT is retired"; its press release rounds the time to "~14:00 UTC."

Even the headcount depends on who you read. Anza's post says 654 validators participated. Solana's page says 654 were on the network, but the certificate over the genesis block carried votes from 446.

The point of all this is finality, the moment a transaction can't be reversed. Solana says that took about 12.8 seconds under TowerBFT and that Alpenglow "targets roughly 150 milliseconds," which it calls "an expectation, not a constant." The builders aren't shy: Anza calls it "the biggest upgrade in Solana's history," and CEO Brennan Watt called it the "most ambitious blockchain upgrade since 'The Merge,'" Decrypt reported. Those are their verdicts, not independent ones.

For holders, Solana says fees, transaction formats and apps are unchanged. The visible change is the transaction count. CryptoWatchDesk, reading a public node, saw vote transactions drop to near zero and total transactions fall from about 286,000 a minute to roughly 94,000 to 102,000, while user transactions stayed in their usual range. That's one outlet's read, but it fits votes leaving the chain, not users leaving Solana. Only phase one is live; the next piece, Rotor, has no date.