Anza, the team behind the Agave validator client, has published a tentative schedule for Agave v4.5. It plans to ask Solana mainnet operators to volunteer 20% of stake onto v4.5 from 30 November 2026, recommend it for general adoption on 7 December, and start activating v4.5 features on mainnet from 14 December. Anza says every date may change and asks operators to wait for its announcements on Discord before upgrading or downgrading.
The schedule
According to Anza's v4.5 release schedule page, last edited on 10 November 2026:
- 5 November: the v4.5 branch was cut (target was 2 November).
- 6 November: testnet nodes running Agave were asked to adopt v4.5 (target 9 November).
- 10 November: devnet upgraded to v4.5.
- 11 to 18 November: release work and feature activations pause during the Breakpoint conference.
- 19 November: feature activations resume on testnet, devnet and mainnet.
- 27 November: the Mainnet-beta Upgrade Candidate is to be tagged on the v4.5 branch.
- 30 November: volunteers asked to move 20% of mainnet stake to v4.5; on testnet, a cluster restart and downgrade/upgrade procedure begins.
- 7 December: v4.5 recommended for general adoption on mainnet; the v5.0 branch is created.
- 14 December: v4.5 feature activation begins on mainnet.
Only the first three steps have delivery dates so far. The rest are targets.
What it means
- Validator operators running Agave or an Agave-based client: no action on mainnet yet. The first mainnet step is the volunteer phase on 30 November, after a release candidate is tagged on 27 November. The general recommendation follows a week later.
- Testnet operators: v4.5 is already the version to run, and a cluster restart procedure is planned for 30 November.
- Delegators: nothing to do. A validator that falls far behind on required upgrades can stop voting and stop earning rewards, so the delinquent count on BitBasic's dashboard is worth watching around the adoption dates.
This comes a week after operators had to install Agave 4.4.1 (or Firedancer v26.10.6) before epoch 1079: Solana validators had to run Agave 4.4.1 by epoch 1079 or be forked off.
At the time of writing, BitBasic counted 661 active Solana validators, with 99.87% of stake held by validators that were voting and 38 validators delinquent. Live figures are on the Solana dashboard and its validator list.
