Solana Alpenglow: epoch 1064 starts on October 21

Solana gets a new consensus procedure on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at around 15:00 UTC. The Solana Foundation has set the date for Alpenglow at epoch 1064. For everyone who only holds or transfers Solana, nothing changes: payments become final faster in future, wallets and applications keep running as before. If you have delegated your SOL, by contrast, there is one thing to settle, and to settle beforehand.

The upgrade sets two conditions for every validator. Miss them at the start of epoch 1064 and the validator no longer votes in the following epoch and produces no blocks. For the delegation attached to it, that means no staking rewards for that period. It can be checked beforehand, not afterwards.

Epoch 1064 begins on October 21 at 15:00 UTC

An epoch is the period for which Solana assigns its validators their duties in the network, and it always covers 432,000 slots, meaning 432,000 short time windows in each of which a block can be created. Alpenglow is armed at the start of epoch 1064.

Epoch 1057 was running on Wednesday morning. Seven epochs therefore lie before the switch, and the date is exactly a week away. The Solana Foundation names October 21 “at approximately 15:00 UTC” on its upgrade page; the word approximately is there for good reason, because the start of an epoch hangs on block progress rather than on the clock.