The Solana Alpenglow main network upgrade is scheduled to begin on October 21st.

According to reports from The Defiant, the Solana development team behind Anza has determined the launch time for the Alpenglow mainnet beta version: around 10:50 AM on Wednesday, October 21st, Eastern Time. At this time, the new consensus system will replace TowerBFT, aiming to reduce the time required for final confirmation of transactions to approximately 150 milliseconds. The upgrade guide published by the Solana Foundation states that under the TowerBFT mechanism, the final confirmation time is roughly 12.8 seconds. It’s important to note that “final confirmation” refers to the point in time when a transaction can no longer be rolled back, and this is not the same as the interval between block creations. The Alpenglow implementation uses the Votor voting protocol, which changes the approach: votes are no longer submitted as part of the transactions on the chain. Instead, messages are directly transmitted between validators, and these messages are combined into certificates. As a result, a block can achieve final confirmation after just one or two rounds of voting. Voting-based transactions…