Solana's next speed upgrade could make its transaction charts look worse, even when nothing is wrong.

Alpenglow is scheduled for October 21, according to the Solana Foundation's updated rollout guide. It targets roughly 150-millisecond finality, the point when a transaction becomes irreversible. The mainnet switch is still ahead, rather than an improvement traders can already measure in production. One less obvious change deserves attention before the countdown ends: validator votes will disappear from blocks.

Those votes currently contribute to transaction totals on dashboards that include them. Removing them can produce a sharp numerical drop without customers sending fewer payments or making fewer trades. Anyone comparing activity before an...