Solana Just Gave Validators a Democracy, and a 15% Bouncer 🗳️

The Solana Foundation unveiled a new framework for protocol-level governance that allows validators to propose and vote on network decisions onchain, the Switzerland-based organization said in a Thursday X post. Called Solana Governance Proposals, or SGPs, the framework lets validators submit core protocol proposals with voting power tied to their delegated Solana ($SOL) stake, separating high-level community signals from the more technical Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs). "An SGP captures a stake-weighted directional decision. It records what the community wants. It is not strictly focused on the technical detail of how to build the feature," according to the GitHub repository launched Thursday.

Under the rules, a proposal must draw endorsements from validators representing at least 15% of actively staked SOL to reach a formal onchain vote, a threshold designed to filter out low-quality submissions. Any validator with at least 100,000 SOL delegated can open a new SGP, and SOL holders can delegate their stake to validators to participate in governance. Delegators who disagree with their validator's vote can override it and submit their own ballot for that specific proposal. "SIMDs should focus on protocol changes, SGPs should be signals from the ecosystem," the Foundation wrote.

The Foundation framed SGPs as a transparent, community-driven alternative to centralized coordination, putting Solana alongside other networks such as Polkadot, Cosmos, Cardano, Tezos and Avalanche that already use stake-weighted governance mechanisms. Governance-level decisions will run through SGPs, while narrower SIMD proposals will continue to address technical protocol upgrades.

The launch follows the Foundation's April rollout of STRIDE, a structured security auditing and incident-response program for Solana-based protocols developed with Web3 security firm Asymmetric Research. Solana ranks as the second-largest blockchain network by total value locked, with $4.92 billion in TVL, behind Ethereum's $37.3 billion, according to DefiLlama at last look. The network generated more than $587,000 in blockchain fees over the past 24 hours, DefiLlama data showed.