What changed in the ecosystem
Releases, tooling and programmes — the things that change what a builder can do this month. Not a price feed.

Rent came down. Your accounts are over-funded
Solana cut rent, so every existing account now holds more SOL than it needs. A new Token Program instruction takes the surplus out without closing anything — and this is only phase one of five.

The two gates Alpenglow needed first
Alpenglow targets roughly 150ms finality against today's 12.8 seconds. Two prerequisite feature gates went live on mainnet in July; the consensus change itself reaches devnet in Agave 4.3.