RPC Fast October roundup: Alpenglow, Velocity plan, and Beam routing benchmarks

October brought changes to stream handling, infrastructure costs, and transaction delivery for Solana production teams. RPC Fast handled the Alpenglow transition smoothly, introduced the Velocity pricing plan, published a seven-route Beam comparison against RPC, and launched a service status page.

So you’ll be busy updating streaming clients, matching your plan to actual demand, and evaluating transaction routes using inclusion alongside latency.

TL;DR

• Alpenglow activated on October 21. TxStream and Yellowstone gRPC users should update clients and review bank grouping, commitment subscriptions, and transaction-count alerts.
• Velocity adds decoded TxStream and unlimited monthly CU usage at $399/month. Aperture includes higher limits and exclusive access to TxStream real-time simulation among standard plans.
• Seven Beam routes recorded 30/30 inclusions each in our October 13 test. The RPC baseline recorded 27/30. 
• Manka joins Beam’s routing options.
• Our status page is live. Hackathon sidetrack submissions are closed, with winners scheduled to be announced by November 11.

Alpenglow is live: Review your streaming assumptions

Solana activated Alpenglow on October 21, 2026. Votor replaced TowerBFT as the consensus protocol; Rotor, the proposed replacement for Turbine block propagation, remains a later phase. RPC Fast’s infrastructure handled the transition smoothly.

Our Alpenglow technical guide explains the consensus changes, commitment behavior, and implications for RPC and streaming consumers.

Solana Alpenglow is live: 150ms finality, Votor, and RPC changes

Guide

Written by:

Olha Diachuk

Date:

27 Oct 26

15

min read

What TxStream and Yellowstone gRPC users should check

Upgrade to the latest TxStream and Yellowstone gRPC clients, then review these assumptions:

• Group candidate block data by (slot, bank_id). Grouping by slot alone risks mixing different candidate banks.
• Reconcile cross-provider streams by blockhash. bank_id is local to a node.
• Prefer finalized for new commitment subscriptions. Under Alpenglow, confirmed and finalized represent the same consensus state. Both commitment values remain accepted by the API for now; confirmed will be deprecated later.
• Remove redundant commitment subscriptions where both now serve the same purpose.
• Re-baseline transaction-count alerts. Vote transactions disappear from blocks and streams.
• Review parsers that relied on PoH tick entries for block boundaries.

For example, an indexer subscribing to both confirmed and finalized should check whether it processes the same state twice before increasing worker capacity.

Velocity fills the gap between Stream and Aperture

The updated pricing model introduces Velocity for workloads that need decoded TxStream without real-time simulation.

Monthly billing prices, checked November 3, 2026.

• Velocity includes 20 Yellowstone and 10 TxStream subscriptions. Aperture includes 40 Yellowstone, 25 TxStream, 15 Shredstream subscriptions, and TxStream real-time simulation.
  Both offer priority chat support with an 8-hour support SLA.
• Unlimited CU removes the monthly usage allocation; request, submission, and subscription limits still apply. 
• Enterprise arrangements cover custom limits, features, and fallback service for dedicated deployments.

Existing customers keep their current pricing through the end of 2026.

Beam benchmark: Seven routes against RPC submission

Our October 13 Beam report compares Apex by Orbit, Astralane, bloXroute, Falcon by Covus, Manka, Nozomi by Temporal, and Raiden Bolt with RPC submission.

Every Beam route recorded 30/30 included transactions and successful executions. RPC recorded 27/30, with three expirations. Astralane had the lowest observed median at 44.6 ms; Manka recorded 54.2 ms.

The primary latency metric measures submission start to local TxStream observation. RPC confirmation is tracked separately through polling. These values describe different points in the transaction lifecycle.

Results from the October 13 test

Percentiles use observed transactions only: 30 per Beam route and 27 for RPC. Missing observations do not receive a latency value. 

What the benchmark establishes—And what to retest

The test ran in Frankfurt on October 13, before Alpenglow, with 30 paired rounds over roughly 7.5 hours. It used warmed connections, Beam QUIC against HTTP RPC, and a compute-budget + tip-transfer + fixed-length memo workload. The metadata identifies a Beam staging endpoint.

Configuration included a 100,000 CU limit, a 100,000 micro-lamport/CU price, and a 1,000,000-lamport tip on every route, including RPC. Confirmation polling ran every 250 ms; TxStream used local monotonic receive timing.

Repeat the comparison from your deployment region, with your transaction shape, fees, and observation path.

Other news to mention

Manka → Beam integration

Open on X

To start using Manka, please update beam-quic-client to v0.2.0.

With Manka and Beam, you get:

• SWQoS for optimized transaction landing;
• Direct routing to the current leader;
• Atomic bundles for coordinated execution and complex liquidations;
• MEV protection for private execution and defense against frontrunning and sandwich attacks.

RPC Fast availability page is live

The RPC Fast status page is now available for checking service availability.

Use it alongside your own monitoring. When an application falls behind, compare provider status with reconnects, consumer lag, queue depth, and slot freshness.

A provider incident and a stalled consumer require different responses. An availability page provides context; your application metrics identify where processing stopped or slowed.

Colosseum’s Crypto World’s Fair hackathon ends—Expecting winners

Submissions to the RPC Fast Infrastructure Sidetrack at Colosseum’s Crypto World’s Fair closed on October 12.

The listing schedules the winners announcement by November 11, 2026. Follow RPC Fast on X and Telegram for the winners announcement, product updates, and promo codes.

Put the October changes to work

October’s updates bring more choice across RPC capacity, streaming, and transaction routing, with Velocity and Manka expanding the available options. Review the Alpenglow changes, compare the updated plans, and use the Beam benchmark to guide testing for your workload.