Solana has activated its first formal onchain governance system, letting validators and the people who stake with them cast a recorded, stake-weighted vote on the network’s direction. Opening a proposal requires 100,000 SOL staked, and delegators can now override how their validator votes.
Solana has switched on a formal onchain governance system called Solana Governance Proposals, or SGPs, giving validators and token holders a direct, recorded vote on the network’s future for the first time. The framework appears in the Solana Foundation’s GitHub repository.
Under the new rules, a validator needs at least 100,000 SOL ($7.70 million) staked to propose a major directional change. Each proposal is a plain-language question about whether the network should pursue a given direction, and it is settled by a vote weighted by how much SOL each participant has staked, with the tally recorded onchain and verified using a Merkle proof.
How a proposal passes
The vote does not open automatically. A proposal must first clear a support threshold of 15% of active stake before it moves to a ballot, a gate meant to keep the network from voting on matters few participants care about. Once that threshold is met, the process runs on a fixed schedule measured in epochs, the roughly two-day periods Solana uses to organize its operations.
To pass, a proposal needs a supermajority: at least two-thirds of the stake voting for or against it, with abstentions left out of the count. There is no minimum turnout requirement.
Separating “should we” from “how”
The design splits two questions Solana had long handled together. An SGP, driven by the community and validators, asks the big-picture question of whether the network should do something. A separate, older track called a Solana Improvement Document, or SIMD, handles the technical follow-up reviewed by core developers.
The system also hands more power to delegators, the everyday users who stake their SOL with validators rather than running nodes themselves. Delegators can now override their validator’s vote or cast a vote if the validator abstained, each weighted by their own stake. The Solana Foundation frames this as staker sovereignty, a way to keep voting power with the people who own the tokens rather than the validators they delegate to.
SOL outperforms a falling market
The launch lands as Solana has drawn renewed interest, with SOL up about 16% over the past week to around $78, per CoinDesk data, one of the few large tokens to gain while the broader market fell.
Source: CoinDesk
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