Solana's Alpenglow consensus upgrade is set to activate on mainnet on October 21. It replaces TowerBFT with Votor and targets transaction finality of roughly 150 milliseconds.
• Validator votes will no longer appear as standard on-chain transactions
• Reported transaction counts may fall without reflecting an actual usage drop
Faster finality could improve Solana's competitiveness for latency-sensitive apps, though post-upgrade activity metrics may be distorted.