Solana daily SOL burns could rise roughly 12x to 14x under proposal
A pending Solana fee proposal projects 7,500 to 9,000 SOL burned daily, but the increase would still trail new issuance.
By Theo Nakamura · Staff Writer
· 3 min read
Solana daily SOL burns could increase from about 648 to 7,500 to 9,000 tokens under a pending validator proposal, according to CoinDesk and a Solana Foundation GitHub discussion. That is roughly a 12x to 14x jump at recent activity levels, though it would not by itself stop the network’s SOL supply from growing.
Validators were signaling support as of Aug. 4 for two linked changes affecting SOL supply. One would create a new fee tied to the computing and data resources a transaction uses. The other would slow the rate at which new SOL is issued, CoinDesk reported.
How would Solana daily SOL burns change?
CoinDesk identified the resource-based fee proposal as SIMD-0553. It estimated that daily burns could rise from roughly 650 SOL to 7,500 to 9,000 SOL. Using the 648-SOL baseline in the underlying GitHub discussion, that range works out to about 11.6 to 13.9 times the current level.
A token burn permanently removes tokens from circulation. The proposal would add a base fee based on a transaction’s requested cost, including computing work, data loaded and write locks, with the added fee burned in full, according to the GitHub discussion titled “Improving SOL tokenomics via a resource-based base fee.” The supplied discussion is numbered #547 and does not itself label the proposal SIMD-0553.
The design would charge 0.1 lamport per requested cost unit, the discussion says. Its author wrote that lightweight market-maker oracle updates requesting fewer than 2,500 cost units would see an increase bounded at about 5%, while more resource-intensive activity could pay more.
Under Solana’s current fee model, every transaction has a base fee and may include an optional prioritization fee, according to Solana’s official documentation. Half of the base fee is burned and half goes to the validator processing the transaction. Prioritization fees, used to improve a transaction’s chance of being scheduled ahead of competing transactions, go entirely to the validator.
The separate proposal would reduce new SOL issuance
The companion measure, SIMD-0550, would double Solana’s annual disinflation rate to 30% from 15%, CoinDesk reported. It would bring the network to its 1.5% terminal inflation rate in 2029 rather than 2032 and remove an estimated 18.9 million SOL of emissions over six years compared with the existing schedule.
The two proposals address different sides of supply: SIMD-0553 would burn more SOL through transaction charges, while SIMD-0550 would reduce the pace at which newly issued SOL enters circulation.
The distinction matters. CoinDesk estimated that even the high end of the new burn range, 9,000 SOL a day, would be offset by about 60,000 SOL in daily inflationary issuance. The fee proposal alone therefore would not make SOL deflationary. At that level, daily burns would equal about 15% of the reported daily issuance estimate.
What was the proposal’s status?
As of Aug. 4, validators had signaled 24.94 million SOL in support, or 5.8% of the 432.65 million SOL staked, CoinDesk reported. The proposals needed about 39.95 million more SOL to meet a 15% signaling threshold before the Aug. 18 deadline and advance to a formal stake-weighted vote.
That leaves the projected burn figures as estimates tied to the proposals and recent network activity, rather than enacted changes to Solana’s fee structure.
This story draws on original reporting from Decrypt.
