Look up the transaction count of the Solana blockchain on Tuesday evening and you find a figure far below last month's. The reason sits in the accounting rather than in the network: since the
Look up the transaction count of the Solana blockchain on Tuesday evening and you find a figure far below last month's. The reason sits in the accounting rather than in the network: since the Alpenglow upgrade on October 21, validator votes no longer count as transactions. Where the price can point on a horizon of months is set out in our Solana price prediction.
What is documented: across five samples of 60 seconds each, the Solana node reported 949,461 transactions on Tuesday evening, and exactly 949,461 of them were non-vote transactions. The difference is zero. Our own assessment follows further below: the series of figures breaks at this point, the operation of the network does not.
SOL trades at $100.79 on Tuesday evening. It entered the preceding 24 hours at $100.15, the daily high stood at $101.22 and the daily low at $99.00. Over that period 330,422 SOL changed hands. The level on which everything turns remains $100.
A Solana blockchain node supplies the latest performance samples on request: for 60 seconds at a time it counts how many transactions and how many non-vote transactions went into the blocks of that window. Both values stood at the same number across all five samples on Tuesday evening.
In the summer it was different. An analysis by Solana Compass for the week from September 30 to October 6 finds that around 56 percent of all transactions on the network were validator votes. Every second line in the statistics was therefore not a user sending a token but a validator confirming a block.
Counted individually, the five samples give a throughput of 3,165 transactions per second. That is the figure left over after the change, and it consists exclusively of genuine user traffic. Since the network launched, the blockchain has processed 564,047,116,949 transactions.
Alpenglow replaced the previous consensus mechanism TowerBFT. Validator votes have since travelled directly between the validators and are bundled into certificates. Those certificates sit in the footer of a block, no longer in the transaction list.
A certificate in this context is a collected proof that enough validators have agreed to a block. For consensus it counts exactly as the individual votes did before; for a counter working through the transaction list of a block, it is invisible.
Solana's project documentation expressly tells developer teams to recalibrate their transaction and throughput displays, because the decline is a question of how counting works. The infrastructure provider Triton One additionally recommends resetting alarms that trigger on small blocks. An analysis of the transition block by Coindoo counts 649 vote transactions there and none after it.
Anyone drawing their own comparisons across October 21 therefore needs the same filter on both sides. A chart that shows all transactions before and only user transactions after shows a collapse that did not happen.
The same five samples also capture the number of slots. A slot is the time window in which a validator may propose a block. In 300 seconds the node counted 1,407 slots, which is 4.69 slots per second, or 213 milliseconds per slot.
Before Alpenglow, slot time on the network ran at about 400 milliseconds. Blocks therefore follow one another at a markedly shorter interval, and the lower cost of the new voting mechanism is precisely the lever that made it possible.
Epoch 1069 stood at 93.27 percent on Tuesday evening. That leaves 29,080 slots on paper, so a good 1.7 hours at the measured slot time until the switch to epoch 1070. The network's inflation rate stands at 3.5841 percent, with 589,874,408 SOL in circulation out of a total supply of 636,517,483 SOL.
Throughput stays high even though the statistics come out lower after the change.
Alpenglow is advertised with a finality of 150 milliseconds. Finality means the time after which a transaction counts as final and can no longer be reversed. The 150 milliseconds are a target value of the mechanism, not a reading from the live network.
An external measurement on October 23 arrived at an average of 404 milliseconds. That is still a fraction of the roughly 13 seconds Ethereum needs for a block, and it sits far above the figure that stood in the announcements. For an exchange that releases deposits and withdrawals on finality, this difference makes the arithmetic.
On Tuesday the Firedancer team at Jump Crypto changed its rules for security reports. Anyone wishing to report a vulnerability in the validator software burns 1 SOL for it, around $100 at Tuesday evening's price. Burning means the coin is permanently removed from circulation, not transferred to a treasury.
The fee applies even when the report turns out to be invalid, already known or outside the scope of the programme. A report without a burn is not considered for a reward at all. Firedancer is the second validator client for Solana, written at Jump Crypto. The resilience of the entire network hangs on whether a second client runs reliably.
The occasion is an audit competition with $1 million in prize money. It drew 809 reports from 162 researchers, which in the end produced 127 independent security findings. Jump assumes that nearly all submissions were produced with the help of language models.
Set against the fee are markedly higher rewards. Until November 20 the programme pays double the usual rate for recognised findings, triple for vulnerabilities related to Alpenglow, and up to $300,000 for critical findings. November 20 is therefore the next deadline on the project's calendar, and it touches the price only indirectly while touching the security of the network directly.
Two lines are decisive for the price this Tuesday. According to FXStreet's calculations, the 50-day line stood at $105.99 on Monday and the 200-day line at $98.27. SOL sits between them at $100.79, closer to the lower line.
As long as the price stays above $98.27, the longer-term upward reading holds. The analysts at FXStreet place further support zones below that at $98.17 to $98.80 and at $95.55 to $96.26. Coin-Turk passes on a warning that a lasting break of the $100 level could open room down to the region around $80, roughly 20 percent lower. That is someone else's expectation, not this newsroom's calculation.
On the upside the first hurdle sits at the daily high of $101.22, the second at the 50-day line of $105.99. Between those two values lie 4.7 percent, and without fresh capital that stretch is hard to cover.
Precisely that capital is missing at the moment. The exchange-traded Solana funds recorded their third consecutive week of outflows last week, $17.30 million by one count. For October as a whole the figures diverge: one tally arrives at $72.24 million, Decrypt at around $68 million, and our own analysis of October 24 counted $30.3 million across five trading days. The spread is explained by different data providers and cut-off dates.
Then there is the futures market. Open interest in Solana futures fell to $6.18 billion, from $6.34 billion the week before. Fewer open positions mean less leveraged demand, and they take some momentum out of the price in both directions.
On Wednesday the US Federal Reserve decides on rates. For Solana this date counts above all by a detour: if the decision comes out as expected, the liquidity that altcoins lacked in October stays scarce for now.
A fee at the entrance is meant to turn 809 reports back into findings that can be checked.
Our analysis of Monday on the Solana price prediction theme stood at a price of $100.89, with a daily low of $99.82 and a daily high of $102.48. On Tuesday evening the price stands at $100.79, ten cents lower.
What has moved is the range. The daily low of $99.00 is 82 cents lower than on Monday, the daily high of $101.22 is $1.26 lower. The range of a trading day thus shrank from $2.66 to $2.22. Ahead of a rate decision that is a familiar pattern: the market waits instead of taking positions.
Unchanged is Monday's reading on the capital locked in Solana applications, and the staking yield still stands at 4.96 percent against inflation of 3.5841 percent. The only new element is the counting question, and it affects none of the figures from Monday's article, because the basis there was trading turnover and not the transaction count.
For a tax return the network's way of counting is irrelevant; the holding period is not. On private sales of crypto assets a gain stays tax free after a holding period of one year, and within the year income tax applies at the personal rate. Where the planned reform of this rule currently stands is tracked in our piece on the status of the holding period reform.
With staking a second layer is added. The ongoing rewards count as other income and are taxable in the year they accrue, once the exemption threshold is passed. Sell the SOL received that way later and a separate holding period begins for those units on the day they accrued. Draw rewards across several epochs and you therefore hold many small deadlines in your portfolio rather than one.
In practice that means checking, for your own staking, which route you run it through and what share of the reward stays with the provider. Between delegating to a validator yourself and taking an exchange's offer there are often several tenths of a percentage point in net yield. Every accrual also belongs on record with its date and price, and that work is handled by the tools in our comparison of tax tools and portfolio trackers. The guide for delegating yourself is in the article on Solana staking.
Our assessment: the change in counting is no issue for the price, but it is one for judging the network. Three pieces of evidence support that. First, throughput of genuine user traffic remains high and unchanged at 3,165 transactions per second. Second, the measured slot time of 213 milliseconds is roughly half what it was before the upgrade. Third, finality at 404 milliseconds on October 23 sits well above the target of 150 milliseconds, so the mechanism is not yet where it is meant to be.
Against that stands the capital side. Three weeks of fund outflows and falling open interest on the futures market are no basis for a breakout above $105.99, and Wednesday's rate decision can move the situation in both directions. The technical improvement works on a horizon of months, the capital flows work on days. Mix the two time horizons and you read a signal out of the new statistics that is not in them.
Three steps for the rest of the week:
The evidence on the counting change is in the Alpenglow documentation of the Solana project, and the new fee rule for bug reports is described by CoinDesk.
(As of October 27, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
