Solana validators holding 20.3% of stake flagged as unprepared before Alpenglow

Solana is about to swap out the engine of its consensus system. A readiness snapshot shared on X flagged 151 Solana validators, holding 20.3% of the network’s stake, as unprepared for the Alpenglow upgrade. Alpenglow is expected to activate on October 21, 2026, at approximately 13:20 UTC. The snapshot was taken on October 20, one day before the switch. What validators need before the switch Validators who want to keep voting on blocks need three things in order. First, they must run an Agave-based client at version 4.3.2. Agave is the validator software that most of the network runs. Older versions won’t satisfy the new rules. Second, each validator needs a registered BLS public key. BLS is a cryptographic signature scheme that lets many individual signatures be combined into one compact proof. Under Alpenglow, those signatures get aggregated off-chain into what the design calls certificates. Third, every validator must keep at least 0.8 SOL in its vote account. That balance covers a new flat fee tied to the Validator Admission Ticket, or VAT, model. Per the research findings, most of the 151 flagged validators fell short for fairly mundane reasons. The main culprits were outdated ...