Solana has introduced a formal on-chain governance process that lets validators and stakers vote on the network's direction.
The new system is called Solana Governance Proposals, or just SGPs. According to the Solana Foundation's GitHub repository, SGPs are documents proposed by Solana validators for stake-weighted, on-chain votes using the svmgov program.
To take an SGP on-chain, a validator vote account needs at least 100,000 SOL behind it, or about $7.7 million with SOL.
- As Solana's docs say, SGPs are for high-level directional decisions, while Solana Improvement Documents, or just SIMDs, handle detailed protocol specifications and technical review by core developers.
But there's also an additional filter before the whole network votes.
- An SGP moves to voting only if at least 15% of active stake supports holding a vote.
- Based on data from Validators Solutions, which shows around 428 million SOL in active stake as of press time, that threshold would equal about 64 million SOL, or nearly $5 billion.
As Solana's docs put it, SGPs are for high-level directional decisions, while Solana Improvement Documents, or SIMDs, handle detailed protocol specifications and technical review by core developers
- Once that threshold is reached, the process runs on Solana epochs, which are roughly two-day periods.
- The proposal goes through seven epochs of discussion, one epoch for the stake snapshot and three epochs of voting, meaning the on-chain process takes 11 epochs after support is reached.
And to pass, a proposal has to clear one more barrier. The approval threshold is at least two-thirds of the stake voting for or against the proposal, with abstentions excluded from the math.
So even though Solana now has a formal way for validators and stakers to put big network-direction questions on-chain, the system is still heavily gated by stake.