Solana has scheduled the mainnet activation of Alpenglow for October 21 at approximately 15:00 UTC, marking the retirement of the consensus mechanism that has been in operation since its launch. The development team leading this upgrade, Anza, stated that the goal for the finalized confirmation time is to reduce it from around 12.8 seconds to approximately 150 milliseconds. The new mechanism can withstand 20% malicious staking plus 20% offline nodes, whereas the old system would fail if more than roughly one-third of staked SOL turned malicious. This is the first phase of a two-phase upgrade, with no date set yet for the second phase. The previously announced activation date of September 28 had been postponed.