Solana Launches Onchain Governance With Stake-Weighted Voting for Validators

Solana Foundation announced Wednesday that onchain governance is live on the network, letting validators propose and vote on protocol-level decisions through a system called Solana Governance Proposals, or SGPs.

The mechanism is fully onchain, stake-weighted and verified by Merkle proof, according to the Foundation's announcement thread. Any validator with at least 100,000 SOL delegated can open a proposal, and a proposal only opens for a vote once it clears 15% of cluster stake support. Delegators who disagree with how their validator voted, or whose validator did not vote at all, can override that vote using their own stake weight.

Merkle-Verified Votes

The system runs on two onchain programs described in the project's technical documentation: an NCN, or Node Consensus Network, snapshot program that establishes verifiable stake weights, and a voting program called svmgov. Whitelisted operators independently build Merkle trees of validator stake from the Solana ledger and vote on a canonical snapshot. Once they agree, a consensus result publishes onchain, and validators prove their stake weight against it with a Merkle proof when they vote.

The two onchain programs are deployed as `ncn-snapshot` and `svmgov`, according to the governance documentation, with the snapshot program building the canonical stake tree that the voting program checks against for every ballot cast.

SGPs Versus SIMDs

SGPs sit apart from Solana Improvement Documents, or SIMDs, the process core developers already use for technical protocol changes. Per the solana-governance-proposals repository, a SIMD answers "how exactly do we do this," decided by technical review from core developers, while an SGP answers "should we do this," decided by a stake-weighted onchain vote. By default, decision-making stays with core developers and the SIMD process; an SGP interrupts that path only when the 15% stake-support threshold is met, and does not block a SIMD from moving forward on its own.

The Foundation pointed validators and delegators to the governance dashboard, documentation and the svmgov codebase to start participating.

The launch follows a run of Solana Foundation initiatives aimed at institutional and validator participation, including a native payments rail for subscriptions and allowances and MoneyGram joining the network as a validator.