Solana will deploy its next major network upgrade, Alpenglow, on Oct. 21. The upgrade is expected to shorten transaction finality to about 150 milliseconds from about 12.8 seconds by replacing the existing consensus system. The rollout is scheduled for the start of epoch 1,064, expected around 1500 UTC. TowerBFT will continue for about 5,000 slots, or roughly 18 minutes, after the feature gate activates, before Alpenglow takes over.

Solana will launch a new transaction format, TransactionV1, to expand per-transaction capacity from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes, more than tripling the limit, CoinPost reported. The change enables processing of large cryptographic proofs and multi-signature transfers in a single transaction, while legacy formats continue to work. Software that reads blocks and transactions must support the new format. Solana is also preparing the AlpenGlow upgrade to cut finality to about 150 milliseconds and plans further rent fee and slot-time changes.