Solana activated Alpenglow's Votor consensus on mainnet-beta on October 21. The Solana Foundation's updated rollout guide identifies epoch 1064 as the activation epoch, while Anza's launch page now marks the production-network migration complete.
The Foundation records slot 459,652,999 as the genesis block and Votor consensus from slot 459,653,000. This extends the rollout beyond the public-testnet migration in September.
Votor replaces TowerBFT's voting and finality logic. Validators exchange votes directly and combine them into certificates, rather than submitting votes as transactions. Blocks can become final after one or two voting rounds. Transaction execution through the Solana Virtual Machine remains unchanged.
Anza's technical documentation describes how nodes outside the admitted validator set receive finalization information. The default path reads certificates from later blocks without additional configuration. An admitted validator can instead forward Votor messages to configured peer identities; the added delay then depends primarily on network latency between those partners.
Agave v4.3.2 was released on October 15 as software suitable for testnet, devnet and mainnet-beta. Its changelog includes Alpenglow transaction-buffering timing fixes and making slot timing available on Windows. It also lists an optional thread pool for BLS certificate verification.
The vote change also affects throughput comparisons. Vote transactions no longer appear in blocks, so transaction-count dashboards need a different baseline. A fall in a total that previously included validator votes does not by itself establish a fall in user activity.
Rotor, the separate block-distribution component, remains planned for a later release without a scheduled date. Votor's activation does not mean that Rotor has replaced Turbine.
Earlier coverage of this event: Solana moves Alpenglow finality upgrade to public testnet.