Solana ran its last block under its old rulebook at 13:54 UTC on Oct. 21, 2026. That block carried 1,051 transactions. Of those, 649, or 62 percent, were validators' votes to confirm blocks, and the other 402 were everything else, Coindoo found1.
Read that number on its own, and the easy story writes itself: Solana just got quieter overnight. That story gets the mechanics backward. Solana's validators kept voting after Oct. 21. The next block carried 1,701 transactions, zero of them a vote.
Solana's validator votes fell from 649 to 0 in one block, Oct. 21, 2026
Transaction counts in Solana's last old-system block versus its first Alpenglow block
- Last block, old system
- First block, new system
Source: Coindoo [1].
Read the chart as a table
| Item | Last block, old system | First block, new system |
|---|---|---|
| Validator votes | 649 transactions | 0 transactions |
| Everything else | 402 transactions | 1,701 transactions |
Votes now travel as certificates outside each block's transaction list1. Vote traffic was "a large share of the transactions in a block," the Solana Foundation's upgrade page says2. The Foundation calls the drop "an accounting change, not a throughput regression." Dashboards, benchmarks and historical comparisons built on the old count now need a new baseline, it adds.
Solana's co-founder cheered a big count in March 2026. Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana Labs' cofounder, highlighted a post that gave Solana 44 percent of global blockchain transactions from March 16 to 223. "That's a big one," he wrote. Some analysts answered that Solana's count included validator votes.
Robin Nordnes predicted the drop before the switch4. He is the chief executive and founder of Raiku, which builds trading infrastructure on Solana. “Solana's transaction count is going to look a lot lower this week, and people will ask if something's wrong. It isn't,” Nordnes told CoinDesk by email.
“Most of what got counted before was validators voting, and that's off-chain now. The trading's all still there,” Nordnes wrote.
Critics made the vote point in September 2024. Duncan Townsend, a smart contract engineer at 0x, an exchange protocol, told Cointelegraph Magazine that Solana's transactions-per-second figure counted votes5. He said Solana was the only chain he could think of that did so.
On Sept. 16, 2024, Solscan counted about 3,274 transactions a second on Solana, the magazine reported5. About 450 of them were something other than votes. Votes made up about 86 percent of that Sept. 16 count.
David Bostik, a crypto educator and a vocal Solana critic, put it more bluntly to the magazine5. “If you try to sift through a single block and see what's an actual transaction versus other fluff, you're going to be there for an hour because there's so much junk in there,” Bostik said.
Another chain leans on big totals too. TRON DAO announced on Sept. 24, 2026, that TRON had settled $30 trillion in total transaction volume since its 2018 launch6. Justin Sun, TRON's founder, compared that sum to the U.S. economy's output in 2025. “Every trillion dollars that moves across TRON represents real people relying on stablecoins for payments, savings, and everyday transactions,” Sun said. The release gives the dollar total and leaves open how much of it people moved.
The trading Nordnes defended has its own problem. Bitquery, a blockchain data provider, flagged $117.7 billion of $201.4 billion in Solana exchange trading as circular or bot-like7. That span ran from Aug. 24 to Sept. 22, 2026, and the flagged share came to 58 percent. Bitquery calls 58 percent a floor, and says its label judges trading patterns and leaves intent aside.
A trade that returns a wallet's own money, minus a fee, counts toward that volume. So does a stranger buying from a stranger.
One wallet made that pattern concrete. Bitquery reported on Oct. 21, 2026, that one wallet used about $12,000 to generate $1.4 billion in suspected wash trades8. The trades ran on Raydium, a Solana exchange. That sum equaled 22.7 percent of the $6.17 billion Raydium's concentrated pools processed from Sept. 21 to Oct. 20, 2026. One pool listed $579 million in liquidity while holding about $19 in USDC, a dollar stablecoin.
One wallet's suspected wash trades made 22.7% of Raydium volume, Sept. 21-Oct. 20, 2026
Raydium concentrated-pool trading volume, Sept. 21 to Oct. 20, 2026, in billions of dollars
Source: CryptoSlate [8].
Read the chart as a table
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| One wallet's suspected wash trades | $1.4B |
| Total Raydium pool volume | $6.17B |
Who pays for padded numbers? Under the old rules, each validator paid about 1 SOL per epoch in vote fees, the Solana Foundation says2. The Raydium wallet paid little too: one round trip logged about $22,200 of volume for $1.13 plus network fees, Bitquery found8. Outsiders barely touched those pools, with four outside wallets trading about $27 there in the prior week.
The risk lands on buyers who read volume as demand. Bitquery found copycat tokens from the wallet's pools near the top of token searches, under tickers such as Monero's XMR8.
Alpenglow's real gain is speed. Solana now targets final transactions in about 150 milliseconds, down from about 12.8 seconds, the Foundation says2. The number worth watching next is simpler: how many of those fast transactions carry a trade a person chose to make.
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Sources
- Kosta Gushterov, "Solana's TPS Fell With Alpenglow - Votes Left the Count," Coindoo, Oct. 22, 2026, https://coindoo.com/solanas-tps-fell-with-alpenglow-votes-left-the-count/
- Solana Foundation, "Alpenglow," Solana Foundation, Oct. 21, 2026, https://solana.com/upgrades/alpenglow
- Godfrey Benjamin, "Anatoly Yakovenko on Solana's 44% Crypto Transactions Domination: 'Big One'," U.Today, March 26, 2026, https://u.today/anatoly-yakovenko-on-solanas-44-crypto-transactions-domination-big-one
- Shaurya Malwa, Francisco Rodrigues, "Solana's Alpenglow, its biggest network overhaul since 2020, goes live Wednesday," CoinDesk, Oct. 21, 2026, https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/10/21/solana-s-alpenglow-its-biggest-network-overhaul-since-2020-goes-live-wednesday
- Yohan Yun, "What Solana's critics get right… and what they get wrong," Cointelegraph Magazine, Sept. 18, 2024, https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/solana-printing-tokens-bots-subsidies
- TRON DAO, "TRON surpasses $30T in total transaction volume as it secures its place as leading chain for stablecoins," Cointelegraph, Sept. 24, 2026, https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/tron-surpasses-30t-in-total-transaction-volume-as-it-secures-its-place-as-leading-chain-for-stablecoins
- Solana Compass Staff, "Bitquery flags $117.7B of $201.4B in Solana DEX trading from Aug 24 to Sep 22 as circular or bot-like," Solana Compass, Sept. 25, 2026, https://solanacompass.com/news/bitquery-flags-1177b-or-58-of-solana-dex-volume-as-circular-or-bot-like
- Oluwapelumi Adejumo, "Solana bot turns just $12,000 into $1.4 billion in trading volume as fake liquidity floods Raydium," CryptoSlate, Oct. 22, 2026, https://cryptoslate.com/solana-bot-turns-just-12000-into-1-4-billion-in-trading-volume-as-fake-liquidity-floods-raydium/