Solana Hands the Reins to Validators With 100,000-SOL Entry Ticket 🗳️

The Solana Foundation has launched Solana Governance Proposals (SGPs), a formal onchain framework that lets validators and their delegators submit and vote on directional decisions for the Solana blockchain. Announced in a Thursday X post, SGPs establish a standard for stake-weighted voting, where a validator's influence is tied to its delegated Solana (SOL) stake. The Foundation said the new system separates high-level community decisions, captured by SGPs, from the narrower technical work handled by Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs), writing, "SIMDs should focus on protocol changes, SGPs should be signals from the ecosystem."

To open a proposal, a validator must have at least 100,000 SOL delegated, a stake worth roughly $7.70 million at the cited level. Before advancing to a formal onchain vote, a proposal must first secure endorsements from validators representing at least 15% of actively staked SOL, a filter the Foundation said is designed to weed out low-quality submissions. Passing requires a two-thirds supermajority of voting stake, with the final tally recorded onchain and verified using a Merkle proof, a cryptographic method for confirming each vote belongs in the count without re-running the full tally. The GitHub repository, also launched Thursday, describes an SGP as capturing "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."

The framework also introduces what the documentation calls "staker sovereignty." Delegators who disagree with how their chosen validator has voted can override that validator and submit their own stake-weighted vote for the proposal. SOL holders who do not run validating infrastructure can already delegate their stake to validators, and the new rules let them reassert that delegation on a per-vote basis. Other blockchain networks operating stake-weighted governance mechanisms include Polkadot, Cosmos, Cardano, Tezos and Avalanche.

Solana ranks as the second-largest blockchain network by total value locked (TVL), with $4.92 billion, behind Ethereum's $37.3 billion, according to DefiLlama at last look. The network generated more than $587,000 in blockchain fees over the prior 24 hours, also per DefiLlama. In April, the Solana Foundation had introduced STRIDE, the Solana Trust, Resilience and Infrastructure for DeFi Enterprises, a security auditing and incident-response initiative developed with Web3 security firm Asymmetric Research, as a separate effort from the new governance system.