Solana's Alpenglow goes live Oct 21: finality drops to 150ms

On October 21, 2026, Solana mainnet activates Votor, the first part of the Alpenglow upgrade that replaces TowerBFT. BLS aggregate signatures cut transaction finality from ~12.8 seconds to ~150ms and remove validator votes from block space.

• Votor activates at epoch 1064 around 14:50 UTC on Oct 21
• Finality improves from 12.8s to ~150ms, an 85x gain
• A ~1KB BLS certificate replaces ~500KB of votes per slot
• SIMD-0326 passed with 98.94% validator approval