Solana Hands the Steering Wheel to Stakers: 100,000 SOL Gets You a Vote 🗳️

The Solana Foundation launched Solana Governance Proposals (SGPs), an onchain framework that lets validators and delegators formally direct the network's evolution through stake-weighted voting. The system, announced Thursday in an X post and detailed in a newly published GitHub repository, separates community-level directional choices from the technical Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs) that have long governed protocol upgrades. Per the repository, 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."

To open a proposal, a validator must hold at least 100,000 SOL in delegated stake, valued at roughly $7.70 million at last look. A proposal then must gather endorsements representing at least 15% of actively staked SOL before advancing to a formal onchain ballot, and final passage requires a two-thirds supermajority of voting stake. Results are verified using Merkle proofs, a cryptographic method that confirms a vote belongs in the tally without recomputing the entire count.

The framework introduces "staker sovereignty" by allowing SOL holders to override or replace their validator's vote on a given proposal, a departure from the typical delegator-validator relationship on proof-of-stake networks. Governance documentation identifies two deployed onchain programs, ncn-snapshot and svmgov, which together build a canonical stake tree and check each ballot against it. The Foundation said in its announcement that "SIMDs should focus on protocol changes, SGPs should be signals from the ecosystem," reinforcing the separation between technical and community tracks.

The launch follows other Solana Foundation initiatives, including April's STRIDE security and incident-response program created with Asymmetric Research, a recent push into native subscription and allowance payments, and MoneyGram joining the network as a validator. Similar stake-weighted governance mechanisms already operate on Polkadot, Cosmos, Cardano, Tezos and Avalanche.

Solana ranks as the second-largest blockchain network by total value locked (TVL), with $4.92 billion against Ethereum's $37.3 billion, according to DefiLlama. The network generated over $587,000 in blockchain fees during the past 24 hours at last look.