Here is where every major Solana upgrade stands as of October 9, 2026. Slots are now 200ms instead of 400ms, transactions can be up to 4,096 bytes, blocks hold more compute, and account rent is 27% cheaper, with a 90% cut planned. Alpenglow, the consensus upgrade that targets about 150ms finality, has run on testnet and devnet since late September but has no mainnet date yet.

Key takeaways

  • Live on mainnet: 200ms slots (final step October 9, 2026), 4,096-byte v1 transactions, the 100M compute-unit block limit, the P-Token program and the first two rent-cut steps.
  • Pending: Alpenglow has no announced mainnet date. September 28 and November 9 are general feature-activation milestones in Anza's release schedules, not Alpenglow dates.
  • What you will notice: a transaction still expires 150 blocks after its blockhash, which is now about 30 seconds instead of about 60. Approve wallet prompts promptly.
  • Fees: the base fee is still 5,000 lamports per signature. The fee-burn and faster-disinflation proposals are not active.

Solana upgrades at a glance

Last updated: October 9, 2026.

Upgrade Status Mainnet timing What it changes
Shorter slots (SIMD-0525) Live 350ms Aug 21, 300ms Aug 28, 250ms Sept 18, 200ms Oct 9 Faster blocks, faster blockhash expiry
100M CU blocks (SIMD-0286) Live July 29 66% more block capacity
P-Token (SIMD-0266) Live May 2026 About 95-98% fewer compute units for common token instructions
BLS keys, Validator Admission Ticket (SIMD-0387, 0357) Live July 8, July 22 Alpenglow prerequisites for validators
Transaction v1 (SIMD-0296, 0385) Live Sept 15 Max size 1,232 to 4,096 bytes
Rent cut steps 1-2 (SIMD-0437) Live Step 1 Sept 3, step 2 by Sept 15 6,960 to 5,080 lamports per byte
Confidential transfers (Token-2022) Re-enabled June 2026 Encrypted token amounts usable again
Rent cut steps 3-5 (SIMD-0437) Pending Expected with Agave 4.4 Down to 696 lamports per byte
Alpenglow (SIMD-0326) Pending No date; live on testnet and devnet About 150ms finality
Faster disinflation (SIMD-0550), resource fee (SIMD-0553) Not active No feature gate scheduled Proposals only

Update log: October 9, 2026: first published, with 200ms slots live and Alpenglow pending on mainnet.

Alpenglow: 150ms finality, but no mainnet date

Alpenglow changes how validators agree that a block is final. Under today's TowerBFT, validators vote by sending transactions, and finality takes about 12.8 seconds. Under Votor, Alpenglow's voting protocol, validators send votes directly to each other and bundle them into certificates, so a block can be final after one or two rounds. The Solana Foundation says "confirmed" and "finalized" become the same thing. Programs, transaction formats and fees do not change.

Where it stands as of October 9, 2026:

  • Testnet and devnet: active since late September, per Anza's feature-gate tracker. Firedancer's October 7 testnet release (v26.10.0) enables it in its default testnet and devnet configs.
  • Mainnet: "Pending Mainnet Beta Activation," with no date. The gate needs Agave 4.3, but mainnet's minimum supported version is still Agave 4.2.2, and the tracker lists Firedancer and Frankendancer as not supported for it. Firedancer's v26.10.0 notes also state: "Migration from Tower to Alpenglow will not be supported." The Foundation's "Q3 2026" estimate has passed.
  • Prerequisites already live: BLS key registration (July 8) and the Validator Admission Ticket (July 22). The ticket admits only validators with a registered BLS key, up to the top 2,000 by stake.

On the dates going around: September 28 was the v4.3 schedule target for resuming general feature activations on mainnet, and the schedule records no delivery date for it. November 9 is the same milestone in the tentative v4.4 schedule. The reliable signals are the tracker moving Alpenglow out of "pending" and the new getAgGenesisCert RPC method, which returns null until a cluster has switched.

Slots are now 200ms

SIMD-0525 cut the target slot time from the 400ms Solana had used since launch, in four 50ms steps gated on healthy block skip rates. The final step took effect at the start of epoch 1053 on October 9, 2026, shortly after 14:40 UTC, per the Foundation. 200ms is a target: earlier steps averaged slightly slower than their targets in practice.

  • Shorter epochs. An epoch is still 432,000 slots, so it lasts about 24 hours instead of 48. Inflation is unchanged in wall-clock terms, because the protocol's slots-per-year figure rose to match.
  • Same capacity per second. Per-slot limits shrink in proportion. The gain is latency, not raw throughput.
  • Slot math changed. Countdowns and timeouts that multiply slots by 400ms are now wrong.

Why your Solana transaction now expires faster

Every transaction includes a recent blockhash and is valid for 150 blocks after it. That count did not change, but blocks got faster: 150 blocks took about 60 seconds at 400ms and take about 30 seconds at 200ms. Miss the window and the transaction can never land, so you see "block height exceeded" or "transaction expired."

The clock starts when the app fetches the blockhash, before the wallet prompt appears, so a slow review or a locked hardware wallet can push you past the limit.

For users and token creators: keep your wallet unlocked, open the Solana app on a hardware wallet before you click, and approve within a few seconds. An expired transaction never landed, so nothing was charged. Just start again.

For builders: fetch the blockhash just before requesting a signature, confirm against lastValidBlockHeight rather than a timer tuned for 400ms, and rebuild with a fresh blockhash on expiry. Durable nonces, the usual answer for slow offline signing, are slated for removal in favor of on-chain offline-signer programs, with no date set.

A Solbase launch shows why this matters. It is one transaction (compute budget, platform fee, mint, token account, supply, Metaplex metadata and, by default, the mint-authority revoke), confirmed against that transaction's own lastValidBlockHeight. If the approval sits in your wallet for more than about 30 seconds, it expires without charging you and you launch again.

Bigger transactions: v1 and 4,096 bytes

The txv1 feature gate activated at the start of epoch 1035 on September 15, 2026, raising the maximum transaction size from 1,232 to 4,096 bytes (SIMD-0296) through a new v1 format (SIMD-0385), per the Foundation. ZK proofs, large multisigs and batched operations can now fit in one atomic transaction.

  • Legacy and v0 still work. Sending v1 is opt-in, and v1 senders must set compute-unit and data-size limits explicitly.
  • Reading is a breaking change. getTransaction and getBlock calls must pass maxSupportedTransactionVersion: 1, and indexers must read limits from the new transactionConfig field.
  • Libraries: @solana/kit 8.0.0 and @solana/web3.js 3.0.2 read and send v1; web3.js 1.99.0 only reads it.
  • Ledger: an open issue (still open as of October 9, 2026) reports that Ledger's Solana app parses v1 messages with the v0 layout and rejects them with error 0x6a80. The Foundation advises apps to check that a wallet advertises v1 support and fall back to v0 if it does not.

More room per block: 100M CUs and P-Token

SIMD-0286 raised the block limit from 60M to 100M compute units on July 29, 2026. Between the 60M increase in July 2025 and that change, 11.2% of blocks used 56M CUs or more, mostly in bursts during volatile markets. The per-account write limit did not rise, so the extra room goes to parallel activity: one hot market or hyped mint crowds out less of everything else. Because SIMD-0525 scales per-slot limits with slot time, each 200ms block holds half the compute of a 400ms block, but there are twice as many blocks.

P-Token (SIMD-0266), a backward-compatible rewrite of the SPL Token program, went live in May 2026. A token transfer drops from 4,645 compute units to 76, and the Foundation estimates total block space usage falls by about 10%. That leaves more room for everything else in a block, though priority fees still matter when blocks fill.

Cheaper accounts: the 90% rent cut

Rent is a refundable deposit, not a fee. Each account holds (128 + data bytes) × lamports per byte, returned if the account is closed. SIMD-0437 cuts that rate from 6,960 to 696 in five steps: 6,333, 5,080, 2,575, 1,322 and 696.

Step 1 went live on September 3, 2026. The Foundation's page last showed step 2 as live only on testnet, but Anza's tracker has listed it as fully activated since September 15, 2026, so rent is 27% below the original. Steps 3-5 are expected with Agave 4.4, whose tentative schedule targets November 9 for resuming mainnet feature activations. Each step can be put on hold, and a separate fallback gate can reset rent to 6,960 if state grows unexpectedly.

What that means for the accounts a token launch creates:

Account (data size) Original (6,960/byte) As of Oct 9, 2026 (5,080/byte) After step 5 (696/byte)
Mint (82 bytes) 1,461,600 lamports 1,066,800 146,160
Token account (165 bytes) 2,039,280 1,488,440 203,928
Metaplex metadata (679 bytes) 5,616,720 4,099,560 561,672
Total ~0.0091 SOL ~0.0067 SOL ~0.0009 SOL

Two caveats. Flat costs do not change: the signature fee, priority fees, Metaplex's metadata fee and any platform fee stay the same. And a classic SPL mint cannot be closed, so its deposit is effectively permanent. Check live values with getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption.

Solbase puts a Solana launch at about 0.03 SOL all-in, including its 0.01 SOL platform fee, and roughly 0.009 SOL of that was rent at the original rate, so launch costs fall as the remaining steps activate. The docs break down each cost, and you can launch a token whenever you are ready.

Fees and SOL economics: proposals, not changes

The base fee is still 5,000 lamports per signature, half burned and half paid to the block leader, plus any priority fee. As of October 9, 2026, neither of these economics proposals is active or on Anza's activation schedule:

  • SIMD-0550 would double the disinflation rate from 15% to 30% a year, so inflation falls faster. The proposal is in "Review" status, and its author said in the pull request that it would go to an on-chain Solana Governance Proposal (SGP) vote. It would still need a feature-gate activation.
  • SIMD-0553, still a draft, would replace the per-signature fee with a flat per-transaction inclusion fee paid to the leader (2,500 lamports in the current text) plus a fully burned resource fee priced on requested compute, phased in over three feature-gated steps.

Confidential transfers are back

Token-2022's confidential transfer extension, which hides amounts with zero-knowledge proofs, and the ZK ElGamal Proof program it relies on were disabled in 2025 for further security audits. Code4rena, Least Authority and ZkSecurity reported no major vulnerabilities, and Anza's tracker now lists the gate that re-enables the proof program as fully activated. A contributor confirmed in the tracking issue on June 29, 2026 that confidential transfers are live on mainnet. v1 transactions help the proofs fit in one transaction. Check wallet support before relying on it.

What it means for you

  • Holders: nothing to do beyond keeping your wallet updated.
  • Traders and token creators: faster confirmations, a shorter approval window and lower rent deposits. Authority hygiene is unchanged: revoke mint authority if supply should be fixed.
  • Builders: parse v1, drop 400ms assumptions, confirm by block height, and switch "confirmed" reads to "finalized" only once Alpenglow is live.

Building on both chains? Our Base upgrades explainer covers the Base side.

FAQ

When is Alpenglow coming to Solana mainnet?

No date has been announced as of October 9, 2026. Anza's tracker lists it as pending mainnet activation, and it needs Agave 4.3, a version mainnet's minimum has not yet reached. It already runs on testnet and devnet.

Is Solana running 200ms slots now?

Yes. The final SIMD-0525 step took effect at the start of epoch 1053 on October 9, 2026, according to the Solana Foundation. Expect twice as many blocks per day and epochs of about 24 hours.

Did Solana transaction fees change?

No. The base fee is still 5,000 lamports per signature, and priority fees work the same way. What got cheaper is the rent deposit for new accounts.

Do I need to do anything with my tokens?

No. None of these upgrades touches existing balances or token accounts. Just approve transactions promptly, since blockhashes now expire in about 30 seconds.

How much cheaper is creating a token after the rent cut?

As of October 9, 2026, rent for the mint, token account and metadata account is about 0.0067 SOL, down from about 0.0091 SOL originally, and would be about 0.0009 SOL after the final step. Flat fees, such as Metaplex's metadata fee and any platform fee, do not change.

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