TLDR
- Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade went live on mainnet around 1:54 pm UTC on Wednesday, targeting finality of about 150 milliseconds.
- SOL trades near $107, up about 2.5% to 3% in 24 hours but down 9.9% in October.
- A new all-time high above $293 would require a climb of about 175%.
- Spot Solana ETFs hold about $1.65 billion in net assets and saw $2.6 million in outflows on October 20.
- Analyst Daan Crypto Trades says SOL has held up well and wants to see a slow grind back to local highs.
Solana’s first major consensus upgrade, Alpenglow, went live on mainnet around 1:54 pm UTC on Wednesday, according to the Solana Foundation’s dashboard. The upgrade aims to cut transaction finality by 99%, to about 150 milliseconds from roughly 12.8 seconds.
Alpenglow is now live on Solana mainnet. ⛰️
Finality just went from ~12.8 seconds to ~150ms.
The biggest consensus upgrade in Solana’s history, built by @anza_xyz. https://t.co/rsvNmBYDzi
— Solana (@solana) October 21, 2026
The first phase, called Votor, replaces the current voting and finalization system with direct validator voting and certificates. A later phase, Rotor, will replace the Turbine block distribution protocol. Alpenglow replaces the TowerBFT consensus model.
At press time, the dashboard showed 6.6-second finality and throughput of 4,721 transactions per second. Cointelegraph has asked the Solana Foundation for comment on testnet measurements and expected real-world performance.
Anza researchers called Alpenglow the biggest change to Solana’s core protocol since genesis. They wrote in May that a 150-millisecond latency would let Solana compete with Web2 infrastructure on responsiveness.
SOL Price Action Around the Upgrade
SOL trades near $107, up about 2.5% to 3% in the past 24 hours. It has moved between $100 and $124 in October and was down 9.9% for the month as of October 20.
Analyst Daan Crypto Trades said SOL has “held up well all things considered” and looks good to him. He wants to see it slowly grind back to local highs, from where he expects it to accelerate. He added that invalidation on the higher timeframe is clear below the green zone, and that SOL has been roughly stable against ETH over the months.
$SOL Held up well all things considered and looks good to me.
Want to see this slowly grind back to the local highs, from there it should accelerate.
High timeframe invalidation remains clear below the green zone so I like the R/R.
vs ETH it has been roughly stable over the… https://t.co/EtwPKakkdf pic.twitter.com/ZCHiDCxBGi
— Daan Crypto Trades (@DaanCrypto) October 21, 2026
On the chart, SOL looks like it is grinding sideways inside a $100 to $124 range, with buyers defending the lower end each time. It is still down 42% over the past year, so this is a bounce inside a larger downtrend. The level to watch next is $125, the September high and the monthly close SOL needs to flip.
SOL has risen 40.8% over 90 days after dropping to $60 in June. It still trades 63.6% below its January 2025 record of $293.
What a New Record Would Take
Solana’s market cap is about $63 billion. At $293, with roughly 589.5 million tokens in circulation, it would reach about $172.9 billion.
Spot Solana ETFs began trading in late October 2025. They hold about $1.65 billion in net assets and had net outflows of $2.6 million on October 20.
Bitcoin trades near $83,454, which is 33.8% below its record of $126,080. Its market dominance is 59.6%. The report lists four conditions for a new SOL high: a monthly close above $125, steady ETF inflows, smooth Alpenglow operation, and a break above $254.
Solana also cut its slot time in August and finished the fourth stage of its slot reduction plan in October. Validators are now expected to work on Agave 4.5, planned for December 2026, which would raise the account limit per versioned transaction from 64 to 96.
