Why transaction counts can fall
Validators currently record votes on-chain as transactions. Alpenglow’s Votor protocol lets them exchange votes directly and combine them into certificates, allowing finality after one or two voting rounds, according to the Foundation.
Removing vote transactions changes the network’s reported activity. CoinDesk quoted Raiku founder Robin Nordnes warning that the transaction count would fall when that voting traffic disappears. A lower headline count after the migration would therefore need to be separated from changes in actual application use.
CoinDesk also reported that validators currently spend about 2 SOL a day on voting fees. The replacement admission ticket is set at 0.8 SOL per epoch. The comparison depends on the length of an epoch, so the ticket should not be described as a fixed daily charge.
A staged upgrade after testing
The testing history includes a failed migration and rollback, CoinDesk reported, citing Galaxy Digital, which participated in the test network. A later migration succeeded before the planned mainnet change. These tests do not prove how the live network will perform.
Wednesday’s deployment concerns Votor. Rotor, a separate redesign of how block data spreads between validators, remains a later phase without a scheduled release, according to the Foundation.
Transaction execution, programs and fee mechanics stay intact. Developers and infrastructure operators still face changes to streaming data and commitment handling. The next useful evidence will be the completed handoff and observed finality under real traffic, including whether applications and their data feeds handle the transition correctly.
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