Solana Alpenglow activation begins today with epoch 1064

Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade starts with epoch 1064 on Oct. 21, now estimated at about 13:20 UTC (9:20 a.m. ET), the Solana Foundation says.

The Solana Alpenglow activation is due today. Solana ($SOL) enters epoch 1064 on Wednesday, Oct. 21, and the Solana Foundation’s upgrade page now puts that start at about 13:20 UTC (9:20 a.m. ET). On Oct. 14, CoinDesk and Decrypt cited a foundation estimate near 15:00 UTC.

The quick take

Price: $SOL traded at $106.96, up 2.6% in 24 hours, as of 8:41 a.m. ET on Oct. 21 (CoinGecko).
Trigger: Epoch 1064 opens the switch, and Alpenglow takes over from the old voting system at slot 459,653,000.
Watch: Whether finality on mainnet gets close to the roughly 150-millisecond target, down from about 12.8 seconds.

What happened

The feature gate turns on as epoch 1064 begins. Solana then keeps TowerBFT, its current voting system, for the first 5,000 slots, or about 18 minutes, the foundation says.

Start times differ by source. The foundation calls 13:20 UTC an estimate, since epochs drift with slot timing. Decrypt reported that core developer Anza gave about 14:50 UTC, and SolanaFloor also cites roughly 14:50 UTC.

Today’s step covers only Votor, the new voting layer. Rotor, which will change how blocks spread across the network, comes in a later release and has no date yet, per the foundation.

The road here was not smooth. CoinDesk reported that the test network was wiped and restarted six times, and one migration failed and was rolled back before a later one worked. Validators backed the plan in September 2025, when proposal SIMD-0326 passed with 98.27% of votes cast, Decrypt noted.

What to watch next

Operators must run v4.3.2 of Agave, Jito-Solana or Harmonic Salsa, the foundation’s page now says. Firedancer and Frankendancer cannot take part while the network migrates.

Every vote account must also hold 0.8 SOL above its rent-exempt minimum. The first fee is charged as epoch 1064 starts and covers epoch 1065, and a validator that cannot pay sits that epoch out. SolanaFloor reports that Jito will put its BAM nodes, run by 376 validators, into temporary maintenance mode for the switch.

Headline transaction counts will likely fall, because votes leave the blocks. “Solana’s transaction count is going to look a lot lower this week, and people will ask if something’s wrong. It isn’t,” Raiku chief executive Robin Nordnes told CoinDesk.

Bottom line: Solana’s consensus switch starts within hours, and the next test is whether its speed target holds on mainnet.