Solana has activated a formal on-chain governance system, requiring 100,000 SOL staked to submit a proposal. Validators thus lose their decision-making monopoly, now shared with their delegators. Does this new voting power permanently change the balance of the network?
In brief
- Solana launches the Solana Governance Proposals (SGP), an on-chain voting system weighted by participants' stakes.
- A proposal must raise 100,000 SOL in play, cross 15% support, then obtain a two-thirds supermajority.
- Delegators can now overturn their validator’s vote thanks to “staker sovereignty”.
How do the new Solana governance proposals work?
Solana formalized its on-chain governance on June 30, 2026, as shown in a filing published on GitHub. The mechanism, called Solana Governance Proposals (SGP), allows any validator with at least 100,000 SOL tied up, or around $7.7 million, to submit a question about the direction of the network, a development that reignites the debate on the real decentralization of large blockchains.
Each proposal must first gather 15% of active stakes before being put to a vote. This filter avoids saturating the network with marginal topics, while letting core developers deploy common changes without organizing a systematic referendum.
The vote then extends over several periods, these periods of approximately two days which punctuate Solana's operations. The network adopts a proposal as soon as it receives a two-thirds supermajority among voters, abstentions excluded, with no minimum participation threshold.
The protocol records each count on the chain and verifies it using a Merkle proof, a method that confirms whether a vote belongs to the final result without recalculating everything.
Why is this change in governance happening now?
Solana has until now dealt with two questions in the same vague process: should we act, and how. SGPs now separate these two stages. A positive vote on a proposal paves the way for one or more Solana Improvement Documents, where lead developers then iron out the technical details.
The other novelty is the place given to delegators. These users, who stake their SOL with a validator without running a node themselves, can now cancel or replace the vote of this validator with their own choice, weighted according to their stake. The Solana Foundation presents this mechanism as a guarantee of sovereignty for token holders.
This launch comes as Solana is going through a surge in investor interest. SOL increased by around 16% last week to reach nearly $78, one of the few major tokens to advance in an overall bear market.
In short, Solana is taking a structuring step by opening its decision-making process to validators and their delegators. The separation between strategic direction and technical execution, combined with the sovereignty granted to stakers, could redefine how the network evolves. It remains to observe the first proposals put to the vote in the coming weeks.
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