Galaxy Research Proposes Voting on a Spectrum to Curb Solana Inflation

Galaxy Digital’s research team unveiled a new proposal aimed at changing how validators reduce inflation on the Solana blockchain.

The research arm of the crypto-focused asset manager revealed the proposal in an X post yesterday, April 17. The proposal outlines a new voting framework for determining Solana’s future inflation schedule, called Multiple Election Stake-Weight Aggregation (MESA).

As of January 2025, Solana operates on a fixed schedule, with an annual inflation rate of around 4.78%, decreasing by 15% every 180 epochs.

Rather than voting on a binary outcome – such as “Yes” or “No” – MESA would allow validators to select from a range of deflation rates (e.g., 15%, 20%, 30%). The final result would then be calculated as a weighted average of the votes cast.

“In plain terms, MESA is an alternative approach to reaching outcomes in governance,” Zack Pokorny, a research analyst at Galaxy Digital, told The Defiant. “Not all governance decisions are black and white – MESA allows for a spectrum of opinions to be expressed, all contributing to consensus around a shared goal.”

Post-SIMD 228

The new proposal comes in the wake of SIMD-228, a governance initiative authored by Multicoin Capital’s Tushar Jain and Vishal Kankani. Introduced in January, SIMD-228 aimed to reduce SOL token emissions by transitioning to a dynamic, staking-based model.

Voting on SIMD-228 opened on March 6, but ultimately failed to pass. Despite receiving 61.6% support, the proposal fell short of the two-thirds supermajority required for approval.

“In the aftermath of SIMD-228, it was clear that the community broadly agreed on the proposal’s intention of reducing SOL inflation, but disagreed on the parameters of the change,” Pokorny explained.

He cited disagreements over details like the exact inflation rate at each stake level. “As a result, there could theoretically be an infinite number of desirable parameter combinations,” Pokorny said. “The current governance framework of ‘yes, no, abstain’ is not conducive to the network reaching agreement on a change in this setting – at least efficiently.”

MESA, by contrast, aims to let validators express preferences across a spectrum of options, allowing the final result to reflect the collective will of the community — even if no one agrees on the exact numbers.

“In the case of SOL emissions, we think this type of multi-option voting mechanism is preferable to a single-outcome vote because it can shed more info on the true preferences of the stake base and possibly negate the need for endless attempts at arriving at a single proposal that has stake consensus,” explained Alex Thorn, Head of Firmwide Research at Galaxy Digital.

“While not applicable to all types of votes, where possible, the MESA approach may bring more efficiency, transparency, and democracy to proof-of-stake protocol governance,” Thorn concluded.

Solana’s SOL is currently trading at around $134, up 1.8% in the past 24 hours and 11.5% on the week, according to CoinGecko.