- Solana completed two protocol upgrades in October, cutting target slot times to 200 milliseconds on October 9 and activating Alpenglow on mainnet on October 21.
- Alpenglow replaced TowerBFT and targets transaction finality of roughly 150 milliseconds, while the slot-time reduction halves Solana’s original 400-millisecond target interval.
- October also brought tooling updates, including Jito’s BAM Direct Bundle Ingest, Solana Microscope, Transaction V1 support in Jupiter’s Swap API and Solana Asset Registry.
Solana completed two protocol upgrades in October that shortened both slot production and transaction finality. According to the Solana Foundation’s October ecosystem roundup, the network activated the final stage of SIMD-0525 on October 9, reducing its target slot time from the original 400 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds. The change effectively halves Solana’s original target interval between slots, giving applications more frequent network updates. The upgrade marks another performance milestone for Solana as its infrastructure continues evolving. October’s network changes formed part of a month that also saw record RWA value across the ecosystem.
Alpenglow Replaces TowerBFT With Faster Finality
The second major change arrived on October 21, when Alpenglow went live on mainnet and replaced TowerBFT as Solana’s consensus protocol. Alpenglow targets transaction finality of roughly 150 milliseconds, sharply reducing the time required for the network to finalize state under its new voting architecture. The activation followed previous testing and moved the consensus redesign from development into production, completing a major step in Solana’s technical roadmap after the earlier Alpenglow mainnet rollout. The Foundation described Alpenglow as a voting protocol and listed its activation as the second completed protocol upgrade of October.
