- Solana validators approved SGP-0002, which doubles the annual rate at which SOL’s inflation declines, from 15% a year to 30%.
- Nothing has changed on the network yet. The cut only happens if a separate technical proposal, SIMD-0550, is accepted and activated.
- Reported tallies of roughly 176m SOL in favour and 66m against come from news outlets rather than a primary results record.
Solana spent most of the past year arguing about how much new SOL the network should create. On Friday that argument produced a result: validators voted to make the supply of new coins shrink twice as fast as it does now. The supply itself has not shrunk yet.
If you stake SOL, this eventually means smaller rewards. The headline yield you see quoted is mostly paid in newly created coins, and there will be fewer of them each year.
If you hold SOL without staking it, the same change works the other way. Every new coin created dilutes your share of the total, and slowing that down slows the dilution. The vote decides which of those two groups the network favours, and it has picked the second.
What was actually voted on
Solana creates new SOL on a schedule. That rate is designed to fall every year until it settles at a permanent floor of 1.5%, and the speed of the decline is what the proposal calls the disinflation rate. It currently runs at 15% a year.
SGP-0002 doubles it to 30%. The destination is unchanged, the floor stays at 1.5%, and the schedule stays fixed and predictable rather than reacting to market conditions. The network simply arrives at the floor in roughly half the time.
Everything else was left alone. The proposal does not touch staking reward mechanics, validator commissions, MEV, transaction fees or block rewards. It is a single number in the issuance formula.
Who receives the new coins today
Newly created SOL is not distributed evenly. It goes to validators, the operators running the machines that produce and confirm blocks, and they pass most of it to the people who have delegated stake to them, keeping a commission.
So the people funding this issuance are everybody who holds SOL, and the people receiving it are the subset who stake. Cutting issuance faster lowers the payout to that subset and reduces the transfer from everyone else. That is the whole trade, stated plainly, and it explains why the vote was not unanimous.
It also raises a question the proposal does not answer. Small validators tend to run on thin margins, and a meaningful slice of their income is commission on issued rewards. A faster taper squeezes them before it squeezes large operators with more delegated stake to earn from. Nothing in SGP-0002 addresses what happens to that end of the validator set.
The second attempt at the same argument
This is not the first run at cutting Solana’s emissions. An earlier proposal, SIMD-0228, tried to replace the fixed schedule with a market-based mechanism that adjusted issuance according to how much SOL was staked. It was complicated, it was contested, and it failed to reach quorum.
The authors of the new proposal, developers publishing under the names Lostin and 0xIchigo at the infrastructure firm Helius, made the lineage explicit. “This SGP represents a simplification of the idea, delivering predictable inflation reduction by doubling the disinflation rate,” they wrote. The question put to voters was narrower still: “should the network pursue a faster reduction in SOL inflation?”
Who actually voted
governance is widely assumed to mean that holders vote. Here, voting power follows stake. Validators vote with the SOL delegated to them, and delegators can direct their own weight, which means influence tracks the existing distribution of staked coins rather than the number of people holding an opinion.
That distribution is concentrated, and the reporting around this vote illustrates it. Several outlets, including The Defiant, Decrypt and CoinDesk, reported that Kraken switched its position late in the process, and that the final count came in at about 176.29m SOL in favour against 66.19m opposed on turnout near 60.7% of eligible stake. Those figures and the vote-switching claim come from secondary reporting rather than a primary results document, and we have not verified them against a governance dashboard. If a single large exchange changing its mind is a story at all, that tells you something about how few participants can move the outcome. Kraken is one of the platforms we cover in our Kraken review.
What has not happened
The vote is an endorsement, not an implementation. The proposal text is explicit that it depends on a separate technical change, SIMD-0550, going through Solana’s normal feature-gate process before anything reaches the chain. Until that is accepted and activated, SOL is being issued on exactly the old schedule.
There is one more wrinkle worth recording. The version of the proposal in the public GitHub pull request was flagged by an automated code-review bot for missing required template sections, including the one specifying the vote itself, at the point it was reviewed. We could not confirm whether the document was completed and merged before voting closed. It is a small procedural detail, and it sits a little awkwardly next to the description of this as a landmark governance milestone.
What to watch
Whether SIMD-0550 is accepted and activated, and how long that takes. That is the step where the emission curve actually changes, and a governance result with no activation behind it is a statement of intent.
After that, staking yields. The headline rates quoted by exchanges and staking providers will start drifting down once the faster taper is live, and how clearly those providers explain why will be worth noting. Watch the small validators too. If the commission base thins and operators consolidate, the network gets more concentrated, which is the cost side of a decision that was sold on its benefits.