Anza told Solana SOL$94.87-5.2% mainnet-beta validators on 30 October 2026 that Agave v4.4.0 is "recommended for general adoption", adding "Upgrade now". Anza's v4.4 release schedule records that milestone as delivered on 30 October, three days ahead of its 2 November target. The next row on the schedule, resuming feature activation on mainnet-beta, is targeted for 9 November, and Anza labels every date on the page tentative and subject to change.
The call closes out a fast ladder. Anza first asked for volunteers to run 10% of stake on the release candidate, which carried a fix Marinade tied to skipped Alpenglow leader slots, then asked for 20% of stake by 30 October. The final Agave v4.4.0 release was published on GitHub on 28 October and now reads "stable release recommended for general adoption", for testnet and devnet as well. It succeeds Agave v4.3.2, which Anza named the recommended release for all validators on 16 October ahead of Alpenglow.
Breaking changes for validator operators: scheduler-bindings v5 and XDP flags
Agave v4.4.0 contains three breaking changes for people who run validators, all listed in the v4.4 changelog. Operators who plug an external block scheduler into Agave (third-party software that decides which transactions go into a block, and in what order) need a scheduler built for scheduler-bindings version 5. The deprecated experimental XDP retransmit flags are gone: --experimental-retransmit-xdp-interface, --experimental-retransmit-xdp-cpu-cores and --experimental-retransmit-xdp-zero-copy give way to --xdp-interface, --xdp-cpu-cores and --xdp-zero-copy. XDP is the Linux fast path validators use to push block data out to the network, and a startup script still carrying the old flag names needs editing before the upgrade. Anza also no longer ships prebuilt Windows binaries.
The six changes since the release candidate are small. The release notes list vote accounts built from padded vote state encoding, updated pins for cargo-build-sbf and spl-token-cli, an acknowledged Rust security advisory (RUSTSEC-2026-0414) in a build-time dependency, and a backport that re-keys the feature set for SIMD-0550.
The command-line tools gain two commission commands. vote-update-commission-bps sets a vote account's commission in basis points (hundredths of a percent rather than whole percents), and vote-update-commission-collector sets the account that receives it. Both take a --commission-kind of inflation-rewards or block-revenue. The tooling is in the release; the on-chain block-revenue commission it points at is a separate feature gate, and it is not among the gates Anza's Feature Gate Tracker lists as pending mainnet activation.
Agave 4.4 RPC changes: minContextSlot, dataSlice and new error codes
Apps and RPC providers get more precise ways to avoid stale answers. In Agave 4.4, getTransaction accepts minContextSlot, and getSignatureStatuses accepts both commitment and minContextSlot. An app can tell an RPC node to answer only if it has caught up to a given slot; a node that is behind returns MinContextSlotNotReached (error -32016) instead of a possibly outdated result. Apps that set the parameter need to handle that error, and the Rust RpcClient adds get_signature_statuses_with_config to use it.
Two smaller changes matter for anyone streaming data. accountSubscribe and programSubscribe now honour dataSlice for binary account data, so a subscriber watching a large account can receive only the bytes it needs. getLeaderSchedule returns a new error, -32022, when the requested validator identity is not in the leader schedule.
What the 9 November date does and does not mean for SIMD-0437 rent cuts
The 9 November target is when Anza plans to resume turning on features for mainnet-beta in general, and the schedule names no individual feature against it. That distinction matters most for the rent cuts in SIMD-0437, which lower the deposit every Solana account must hold. Helius's Agave 4.4 explainer places the last three of SIMD-0437's five steps (2,575, 1,322 and 696 lamports per byte, against an original 6,960) in the Agave 4.4 cycle, without dates.
Anza's own Feature Gate Tracker shows how far those steps are from mainnet. It lists step 3, "Set lamports per byte to 2575", under pending testnet activation, with the gate carried in Agave v4.3.0-rc.1 and Firedancer v26.10.0. Steps 4 and 5 are not on the tracker yet, and the v4.4 schedule shows no delivery date for resuming feature activation on testnet. A rent cut on mainnet therefore still has to clear testnet first, and no mainnet date has been published for any of the three remaining steps. Our earlier coverage of step 1 going live on mainnet explains what the cuts mean for the SOL locked in accounts.
The same applies to SIMD-0550, the proposal to double the rate at which Solana's inflation falls, which validators debated ahead of the August vote. The v4.4.0 notes re-key its feature gate, and nothing in the release, the schedule or the tracker gives it an activation date.
That leaves a clean split. The operator and RPC changes in Agave v4.4.0 take effect on each node as it upgrades, starting now. The protocol changes riding behind the release arrive one feature gate at a time, testnet first, and none of them has a mainnet date yet.
