Solana Proposal to Pay Full Priority Fees to Validators Goes Live

A proposal to reward Solana validators with 100% of priority transaction fees has gone live, according to a Feb. 12 X post from Solana news platform SolanaFloor.

Under the previous fee distribution model, Solana validators received only 50% of the network’s priority fees, as the remaining 50% were burned. However, when SIMD-0096 was proposed in May 2024, the authors argued that it did not fully align with validator incentives and encouraged side deals.

For example, if a user wanted to prioritize their transaction, they could bribe a validator with a 75% priority fee under the previous model rather than pay a 100% priority fee, where the validator received only 50%. This created an imbalance between validator incentives and the overall health and security of the network.

SIMD-0096 resolves this issue by eliminating the partial burn so that 100% of priority fees now go to validators.

However, not everyone in the Solana community is happy about the new distribution model.

Max Kaplan, CTO of Solstragies, said in a Feb. 12 X post that it introduced new situations that are net negatives for the network.

According to Kaplan, the new model allows validators to incentivize staking with them by promising to share a portion of block rewards with stakers, introducing a layer of trust between stakers and validators that was not there before.

“Because there are no guarantees from the network itself that a validator will pay the percentage of block rewards they said they would, this makes for a prime opportunity to ‘rug.’ I am not saying that I think validators WILL rug. I am simply stating that this is a real possibility,” Kaplan said.