Solana Whales Flick the Switch: Two Proposals Could Send SOL Burns Through the Roof

The governance clock is ticking (and some big wallets just pushed start)

Two Solana supply proposals just cleared a community support hurdle and moved into the discussion phase — which means a vote could be coming after the current window closes on Aug. 22 at 15:13 UTC. If the vote passes and the code changes are gated in, the token economics on-chain would actually change, not just the whiteboard models.

Two heavyweight supporters put serious stake behind the moves: Helius and Jupiter are listed as the largest named backers, contributing roughly 16 million and 12.47 million SOL respectively to get the proposals into discussion. That doesn’t make anything final yet, but it does flip the discussion timer from idle to live. The head of Helius celebrated the milestone as the first step toward a formal on-chain decision.

What the proposals do — in plain (and slightly sarcastic) terms

There are two separate but related ideas on the table: one turns down future issuance faster, and the other reworks transaction fees so the network burns a lot more SOL.

SGP-0002 targets issuance. The proposal would double Solana’s annual disinflation rate from 15% to 30% while keeping the same 1.5% long-term inflation target. In human terms: the network would reach that 1.5% inflation level much sooner — roughly 2.8 years under the authors’ assumptions versus the current ~5.7-year pathway. Their six-year modeling suggests about 18.9 million fewer SOL issued over that span (roughly 2.6% less issuance), although those figures depend entirely on the proposal’s assumptions and models.

Because new issuance funds staking rewards, squeezing issuance earlier pulls staking yields down. Using a scenario with about 68% of SOL staked, the estimated staking yield would start around ~5.8% today, dip to ~4.3% after a year, drop to ~3% after two years and reach roughly ~2.25% by year three. The model excludes things like commissions, MEV, and other non-base rewards. The proposal would also compress validator economics into an earlier window — the authors’ baseline counted several hundred validators near unprofitable thresholds, and that count nudges up as inflation tightens.

SGP-0003 rearranges how fees are split and how much gets burned. Right now each signature carries a base fee (5,000 lamports in the current setup) with half burned and half going to the block leader. The new idea swaps that for a smaller inclusion fee paid entirely to the leader and introduces a separate, usage-based resource fee that would be burned completely. Priority fees would still go to leaders.

The resource fee would ramp through three sample rates: 0.1, 0.25 and 0.5 lamports per requested cost unit. Based on recent network usage in the authors’ examples, that design could increase daily SOL burns dramatically — roughly 1,500–1,800 SOL per day at the low step and something like 7,500–9,000 SOL per day at the top step. For comparison, current signature fee burns are estimated at about 648 SOL a day. The upshot: efficiently budgeted transactions could end up cheaper, while resource-heavy or loosely budgeted ones would pay more and effectively subsidize the burn pool.

So what’s the practical picture? If both proposals move from discussion to an approved vote and then into implementation, the network would see faster disinflation plus a much higher on-chain burn rate — a double-whammy that changes supply dynamics sooner rather than later. Whether that becomes a price story, a validator-cost story, or both depends on voter turnout, actual implementation details and how users and apps adapt.

Bottom line: big staked support flipped the discussion switch. If the community agrees in a vote and the code changes land, Solana’s issuance schedule and fee mechanics could look a lot different — with much more SOL getting burned every day. Buckle up; the next few governance steps will tell whether this is a polite nudge or a full-blown economic pivot.