Solana Turns On Stake-Weighted Governance, and Sets the Entry Price at 100,000 SOL

Solana has launched a formal on-chain governance system. It lets validators and the people who stake tokens with them use a stake-weighted vote to signal what direction the network should take. The mechanism, called Solana Governance Proposals, runs through an on-chain program named svmgov and is meant for high-level direction rather than detailed code changes, CoinDesk reported.

Any validator with at least 100,000 SOL delegated to it can open a proposal, a threshold worth roughly $7.7 million at current prices. A proposal that reaches 15% support enters a fixed process spanning eleven epochs, with seven for discussion, one for a network snapshot, and three for voting. It passes only if affirmative votes reach at least 66.67% of the votes cast, according to project documentation cited in reporting. Stakers can override how their chosen validator votes.

The design formalizes something Solana previously settled through informal validator coordination. It also attaches a concrete number to who gets to direct the network. The stake requirement serves two purposes. It guards against frivolous proposals, and it measures how concentrated proposal power is, because the right to set the agenda now belongs to holders of large amounts of the token rather than to the wider user base.