Key Points

• Solana is scheduled to be activated on October 21st. Alpenglow
• The goal of this upgrade is to reduce the final transaction confirmation time to 150 milliseconds.
• Before going live, the readiness of verifiers remains a concern.

Solana is preparing to activate its largest consensus upgrade on October 21st, replacing the blockchain's existing final confirmation system with Alpenglow. Alpenglow is a new protocol designed to reduce the final confirmation time from about 12.8 seconds to just 150 milliseconds.

Developer Anza confirmed on October 20th that this switch plan will take place at block slot 459,653,000, and it is currently expected to happen around 14:00 on Wednesday, UTC. However, the exact time may vary depending on the network's block generation speed.

However, as the launch approached, an important operational challenge emerged: as of early Tuesday, approximately 20.3% of the Solana pledged tokens were associated with verifiers that were marked as not yet ready.

Solana Alpenglow aims to achieve a final confirmation time of 150 milliseconds on October 21st.

This upgrade will replace TowerBFT with Votor, which is the original consensus mechanism of Solana. Votor allows verifiers to exchange votes directly, rather than recording separate voting transactions on the blockchain.

According to Solana Foundation, this change is intended to reduce the final confirmation time by approximately 98.8%.

Final confirmation refers to the point in time when a transaction can be deemed irreversible under the blockchain consensus rules, and not merely the fact that it appears in the most recently generated block.

Faster final confirmation could be beneficial for applications such as payments, decentralized transactions, and financial settlements.

Solana has expanded its corporate payment infrastructure and has attracted the interest of large payment companies.

However, the final confirmed target still depends on the actual performance of the mainnet after activation.

This switch will also remove regular validator voting transactions from the blocks.

As previously reported by Coinpaper, even if there is no change in actual user activity, the number of transactions reported may still decline significantly.

Over 20% of Solana pledges have been marked as not ready.

Before the switch on Wednesday, the readiness of verifiers has become the most immediate concern.

According to the data cited by SolanaFloor on October 20th, 151 validators, accounting for approximately 20.3% of the total staked amount, were marked as not ready.

There has been an improvement compared to the previous day, with about 45% of the stakes being marked as not ready. However, these numbers represent changing snapshots rather than the final activation statistics.

Verifiers must run compatible software, register for the BLS encryption key, and retain sufficient SOL in their voting accounts to cover the new admission fees.

Solana Foundation It is recommended that supported validator clients use version 4.3.2.

Operators that fail to meet the requirements may be excluded from voting and block generation, which could potentially affect staking rewards.

The reason these requirements are important is that the verifier ecosystem of Solana has previously faced concerns regarding operational costs and the concentration of stakes.

This upgrade also introduces a verification fee for each epoch 0.8 SOL, replacing the existing on-chain voting fee structure.

This also adds new considerations to the ongoing discussions surrounding the economics of collateralization centered around Solana.

What does Alpenglow mean to SOL and the internet?

For the holders of SOL, the most critical issue at present is whether the activation process can proceed smoothly.

According to the migration plan, TowerBFT will continue to run for a short period after the designated activation of epoch begins, and the actual consensus switch will occur at the designated time of slot.

The new system has also changed the security assumptions of the network: under its described fault model, it is capable of maintaining consensus even in the presence of up to 20% malicious staking and another 20% offline staking.

However, successful deployment does not mean that the price of SOL will automatically rise.

Previous analyses of the price of Solana considered Alpenglow as a fundamental catalyst, while also emphasizing the importance of the broader market environment.

For institutional users, faster settlement may enhance the position of Solana in the fields of payments and tokenized assets, especially when companies evaluate the final confirmation speed, reliability, and transaction costs of blockchain.