Solana validators approved the SIMD-0326 proposal implementing Alpenglow in September 2025 with over 98% voting in favor

Overview Debates Related claims Topics Sources

Solana core engineering firm Anza developed the Alpenglow upgrade and took the protocol from a white paper to mainnet deployment in under 18 months

Alpenglow is designed to continue operating with up to 20% of stake acting maliciously and another 20% offline

Alpenglow condenses Solana's previous two-step transaction confirmation process under TowerBFT into a single step for finality

Moving validator votes off-chain under Alpenglow is expected to reduce Solana's reported transaction counts and TPS because vote transactions are no longer included in blocks

Under Alpenglow's Votor mechanism on Solana, validators send BLS-signed vote messages directly off-chain rather than submitting votes as block transactions

Following Alpenglow, developers at Jump Crypto proposed removing Solana's 60 million compute-unit block limit to let block size scale with validator hardware

Solana activated its Alpenglow consensus upgrade on mainnet-beta on October 21, 2026, replacing TowerBFT at slot 459,653,000

The Alpenglow upgrade reduces Solana's transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds

During public testnet and devnet testing, Alpenglow achieved median finality times as low as 54 milliseconds

Alpenglow on Solana can finalize a block in one round if 80% of stake votes for it, or in two rounds requiring 60% of stake per round

Under Solana's Alpenglow upgrade, validators pay a flat 0.8 SOL per epoch fee rather than paying per-vote transaction fees

Balaji Srinivasan proposed requiring blockchain users to consent in advance to network state rollbacks if a cryptographic signature scheme is broken

Haseeb Qureshi proposed deploying a validator kill switch that forces blockchain addresses into cryptographic recovery mode without requiring hard fork upgrades

TokenLogic submitted an October 15, 2026 governance proposal to introduce a permissioned GHO Stability Module for USAT on Aave V4 on Avalanche.

An amendment to XRP Ledger rules, such as fixCleanup3_4_0, requires continuous approval from over 80% of the network's 35 default trusted validators—at least 29 votes—for two consecutive weeks before activating

Ripple's proposed LendingProtocol amendment (XLS-66) held 19 of 35 validator votes as of October 19, 2026, leaving it 10 votes short of the 29 needed for activation.

The fixCleanup3_4_0 amendment closes a loophole that could allow account roles authorized only to burn tokens to create new tokens under specific conditions.

The XRP Ledger SingleAssetVault amendment (XLS-65), designed to store deposited assets for lending, held 21 validator votes as of October 19, 2026, leaving it eight votes short of approval.

The XRP Ledger fixCleanup3_4_0 amendment reached 29 validator votes on October 9, 2026, and held 29 on October 19, 2026, tracking activation around 09:34 UTC on October 23, 2026, with a single validator withdrawal restarting its 14-day countdown.

Even if the LendingProtocol proposal reached 29 validator votes immediately, the required two-week voting period prevents the lending feature from activating before early November 2026.