Solana Foundation Launches Framework for Protocol Governance

The Solana Foundation, the Swiss organization that supports the Solana network’s development, launched a new framework for protocol-level governance that enables proposing and voting on governance decisions for the Solana blockchain. 

The Solana Governance Proposals (SGPs) establish a standard that enables validators to submit core protocol proposals and vote onchain, with voting power based on their delegated Solana (SOL) stake, the Foundation announced in a Thursday X post.

“An SGP captures a stake-weighted directional decision. It records what the community wants. It is not strictly focused on the technical detail of how to build the feature,” according to the GitHub repository, launched on Thursday.

The new framework offers Solana a transparent, community-driven way to make major protocol decisions, reducing reliance on centralized coordination while keeping technical implementations, or Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs), separate from community governance. 

Other blockchain networks with similar stake-weighted governance mechanisms include Polkadot, Cosmos, Cardano, Tezos and Avalanche.

Source: Solana Foundation on X.com

Proposals require minimum 15% support

A proposal must receive endorsements from validators representing at least 15% of actively staked Solana tokens to qualify for a formal onchain vote, a measure that seeks to filter out low-quality proposals.

Validators with at least 100,000 SOL delegated can open a new governance proposal via SGP. SOL stakers can delegate their stake to validators, allowing them to participate in the governance process on their behalf.

Delegators who disagree with how their validator has voted can now override the validator and submit their own vote on the proposal, hence overriding the validator’s vote for that proposal.

SGP voting information, minimum threshold. Source: GitHub

The Solana Foundation said that governance-level proposals will be SGPs, while smaller SIMD proposals will focus on technical protocol upgrades.

“SIMDs should focus on protocol changes, SGPs should be signals from the ecosystem,” wrote the Foundation. 

Related: South Korea’s Shinhan Card taps Solana to test real-world stablecoin payments

In April, the Solana Foundation introduced a new security auditing framework and incident-response network for Solana-based protocols, in partnership with Web3 security firm Asymmetric Research.

The new initiative, the Solana Trust, Resilience and Infrastructure for DeFi Enterprises (STRIDE), is a “structured program for evaluating, monitoring and escalating security across Solana projects,” according to the April announcement.

Top blockchain networks by TVL. Source: DefiLlama

Solana ranks as the second-largest blockchain network with $4.92 billion in total value locked (TVL), behind Ethereum’s $37.3 billion. Solana generated over $587,000 in blockchain fees during the past 24 hours, according to DefiLlama at last look.

Magazine: ‘If you want to be great, make enemies’: Solana economist Max Resnick