Agave 4.4.0 goes stable for 20% of Solana stake

Serguey Asael Shinder30 October 2026, 09:402 min read

Anza has promoted Agave 4.4.0 from release candidate to stable. The GitHub release, published on 28 October, describes it as a stable release recommended for 20% adoption, meaning validator operators are asked to move a fifth of mainnet stake onto it while the rest stays on the previous line, and it is recommended for testnet and devnet.

According to the 4.4.0 changelog, the release has breaking changes on two fronts. Prebuilt Windows binaries are no longer provided. For validators, the scheduler-bindings version rises to 5, so external block schedulers that connect to the validator must be updated, and three long-deprecated experimental retransmit flags for XDP are removed in favour of --xdp-interface, --xdp-cpu-cores and --xdp-zero-copy.

On the RPC side, getTransaction now accepts minContextSlot and getSignatureStatuses accepts commitment and minContextSlot; both return error -32016 when the node has not yet reached the requested slot. getSignatureStatuses still defaults to the processed commitment. accountSubscribe and programSubscribe now honour dataSlice for binary account data, and getLeaderSchedule returns a new error -32022 when the requested identity is not in the schedule. The command-line tool gains vote-update-commission-bps, which sets a vote account's commission in basis points separately for inflation rewards and block revenue, and a matching command to set the commission collector.

The last changes between the release candidate and the stable tag were backports, among them a fix to how vote accounts are built for reward calculation and a re-keyed feature gate for SIMD-0550.

What it means

For RPC providers and application developers, minContextSlot on transaction lookups closes a familiar race in which a client queries a node that has not yet caught up and treats a missing result as final. For operators running custom schedulers, the bindings bump is the item that requires work before upgrading. The 20% figure is a staged rollout, not a judgment of quality.