Solana sets Oct. 21 Alpenglow upgrade with 150ms finality target

Solana’s developers have scheduled the Alpenglow consensus upgrade for Oct. 21, targeting roughly 150-millisecond finality while asking validators and application operators to prepare for changes during the mainnet handoff. Summary Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade is scheduled for Oct. 21, targeting roughly 150-millisecond transaction finality. Quicknode warns of a brief transaction pause and possible data-stream interruptions during the handoff. Validators must use compatible software and fund vote accounts for the 0.8 SOL admission fee. Some RPC nodes may receive finality information later than validators participating directly in consensus. Quicknode’s maintenance notice identifies Wednesday as the planned activation day, but its latest update warns that the original 14:50 UTC estimate could move forward to 13:20 UTC as block production advances. The provider asks operators to be ready from 13:00 UTC, with the consensus handoff following activation by roughly 20 minutes. Solana Foundation’s current upgrade page puts the change in epoch 1064 and lists mainnet as not yet activated. Its updated estimate places the epoch’s start near 13:20 UTC, making the epoch boundary the relevant trigg...