Galaxy Research Proposes Overhaul to Solana’s Inflation Voting System

Crypto research firm Galaxy Research has introduced a proposal that aims to reform how future decisions are made about Solana’s token inflation rate.

The latest move follows a failed attempt to reach consensus in a previous governance vote.

The earlier vote – SIMD-228 – had sparked strong community engagement and broad agreement on the need to reduce inflation, but ultimately fell short due to limitations in the voting structure.

The new proposal suggests replacing the traditional single-outcome voting method with a more flexible and representative system called Multiple Election Stake-Weight Aggregation, or MESA. Rather than asking voters to choose a binary “yes” or “no” on a single deflation rate, MESA allows validators to select from a range of deflation options, such as maintaining the current 15% rate or increasing it to 17.5%, 20%, or more.

Each validator’s vote is weighted by their stake, and the final outcome is a weighted average of all the selected rates. This market-driven approach is designed to better reflect the diverse preferences across the Solana ecosystem and aims to offer a middle ground instead of forcing the community to align around one predetermined figure.

By doing so, it seeks to avoid repeated re-voting and governance deadlock, and aims for smoother decision-making without sacrificing predictability. The fixed, time-dependent disinflationary structure – with a 1.5% terminal inflation rate – would remain in place, to preserve long-term consistency while giving the community more influence over how quickly that terminal rate is reached.

The proposal also outlines practical steps for implementation, such as clearly labeling different voting options and setting an appropriate quorum and supermajority threshold.

If adopted, this method is expected to not only streamline Solana’s inflation decisions but also serve as a model for other decentralized protocols facing similar governance challenges. The proposal is currently under discussion and invites feedback on key parameters like vote weighting, choice intervals, and thresholds for implementation.