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The Solana Foundation, the Switzerland-based nonprofit backing the Solana blockchain's development, has introduced a fresh governance model designed to let the community formally weigh in on major protocol-level decisions.
Announced via a post on X on Thursday, the new system — called Solana Governance Proposals (SGPs) — gives validators a structured way to put forward proposals and cast votes directly on-chain. Voting weight is tied to how much SOL a validator has staked or has had delegated to them.
According to the project's GitHub repository, also published Thursday, an SGP is meant to reflect the collective will of stakeholders rather than get bogged down in engineering specifics. The goal is to capture a clear, stake-weighted signal of what the community wants, leaving the "how" to a separate technical track.
Separating "What" From "How"
That technical track already exists in the form of Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs), which handle the actual implementation work. By splitting community sentiment (SGPs) from engineering execution (SIMDs), the Foundation says it can offer a more transparent, decentralized decision-making process — one that doesn't rely as heavily on centralized coordination to move the network forward.
This kind of stake-weighted voting isn't unique to Solana; networks like Polkadot, Cosmos, Cardano, Tezos, and Avalanche run comparable systems.
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A 15% Support Threshold to Filter Out Noise
Not every idea makes it to a vote. A proposal needs backing from validators representing at least 15% of all actively staked SOL before it can advance to a formal on-chain vote — a bar intended to weed out proposals that lack real community interest.
To actually launch a proposal, a validator needs a minimum of 100,000 SOL delegated to them. Everyday SOL holders who delegate their stake to a validator gain an indirect voice in governance through that validator's vote. Importantly, if a delegator disagrees with the choice their validator makes, they can now step in and cast their own vote instead, effectively overriding the validator's position on that specific proposal.
The Foundation summed up the division of labor simply: SIMDs are for protocol engineering, while SGPs exist to capture ecosystem-wide signals.
Part of a Broader Push on Network Maturity
This isn't the Foundation's only recent move to formalize how the network operates. Back in April, it rolled out a new security framework called STRIDE (Solana Trust, Resilience and Infrastructure for DeFi Enterprises), built in collaboration with security firm Asymmetric Research. That program was designed to standardize how security risks across Solana-based projects get evaluated, tracked, and escalated.
On the numbers side, Solana currently holds the number-two spot among blockchains by total value locked, with roughly $4.92 billion, trailing Ethereum's $37.3 billion. Per DefiLlama, the network has pulled in over $587,000 in fees in the past 24 hours.
