Measuring Solana’s Fee Proposal: What 37,365 Transactions Show

SIMD-0550 and SIMD-0553 would change Solana's emissions schedule and the way its transactions are priced. We sampled mainnet to measure the fee proposal directly, and looked at what the historical record says about the effect of lower emissions on staking participation.

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Two separate governance proposals are before the Solana community, and voting is open at the time of writing. SIMD-0550 would accelerate the reduction in network inflation, reducing both new SOL issuance and nominal staking rewards. SIMD-0553 would change how transactions are priced, by introducing a fee linked to the network resources each transaction requests.

For our recent research on both proposals, we sampled Solana mainnet directly to measure the effect of the fee proposal on validator revenue. The findings below are drawn from that work.

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What the sample shows

On 7 August 2026 we collected 24 approximately hourly finalised Solana mainnet blocks using the getBlock JSON-RPC method, covering 37,365 transactions. Across that sample, transactions carried an average of 1.0412 required signatures. Multi-signature transactions accounted for 3.19% of the sample.

That distribution determines the size of the revenue effect. Solana currently charges a base fee of 5,000 lamports for each signature included in a transaction, half paid to the block leader and half burned, so the leader receives 2,500 lamports per required signature. On our sample that implies a sample-weighted leader payment of 2,603 lamports per transaction. Under SIMD-0553 as originally specified, the leader would instead receive a flat 2,500-lamport inclusion fee per transaction, a reduction of 103 lamports, or 3.96%.

The leader-level inclusion payment would be unchanged for a one-signature transaction, fall from 5,000 to 2,500 lamports for a two-signature transaction, and fall from 7,500 to 2,500 lamports for a three-signature transaction. Priority fees would be unchanged.

For scale, the base fee currently pays leaders on the order of 650 SOL a day, the same amount it burns, against daily issuance of approximately 60,000 SOL. A reduction of this size in leader inclusion-fee revenue is equivalent in scale to roughly 4 basis points of staking rewards, though it accrues to validator fee revenue rather than to protocol staking rewards directly.

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Vote transaction costs before Alpenglow

SIMD-0553 would not change SOL issuance or inflationary staking rewards. Its other near-term effect on validators concerns the cost of submitting on-chain vote transactions before Alpenglow, the proposed consensus upgrade that would move validator voting off-chain.

Validators are currently required to submit transactions to record their votes on-chain, allowing the network to confirm which blocks validators have agreed on. Each vote costs 5,000 lamports, and with approximately 210,000 slots per day, vote fees cost validator operators around 1.05 SOL per day.

Under SIMD-0553 the cost would have two parts: a fixed 2,500-lamport inclusion fee and a variable resource fee based on cost units, which measure the processing capacity a transaction asks the network to reserve. An optimised vote, configured with realistic limits, would request approximately 3,765 cost units. At the proposed rate of 0.5 lamports per unit, its resource fee would be 1,883 lamports and its total cost 4,383 lamports, approximately 12.3% below today’s fee.

A legacy vote without those settings would automatically request approximately 54,000 cost units, because it uses much higher default limits rather than because the vote requires that much processing. Its total cost would be 29,500 lamports, nearly six times the fee today. Annualised, that is approximately 346 SOL per validator on an optimised configuration, against approximately 394 SOL under the current fee structure and approximately 2,326 SOL on a legacy one.

Validator clients would need to update their settings to avoid this increase, by adding Compute Budget instructions specifying realistic compute-unit and loaded-account-data limits. This is a validator operating cost rather than additional revenue, and it would cease to apply once Alpenglow moves consensus voting off-chain. Mainnet activation of its first phase, Votor, is currently targeted for Q4 2026.

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Staking participation and reward sensitivity

SIMD-0550 is a separate proposal on a separate ballot. It would double the annual rate at which Solana’s inflation reduces, from 15% to 30%, without changing the long-term inflation floor of 1.5%. Based on current estimates, Solana would reach that floor in approximately 2.8 years rather than 5.7, bringing the expected date forward from around 2032 to around 2029.

A lower staking reward rate could, in principle, reduce the incentive to stake. The historical record suggests that the relationship between staking reward rates and participation is not one for one. Between April 2021 and August 2026, protocol inflation roughly halved, from about 7.83% to about 3.71%, while staking participation moved from around 69.2% to around 68.5%, having peaked near 79.3% and troughed near 63.6% over the period.

That observation is descriptive and does not establish causation. Staking participation also reflects liquidity needs, custody arrangements, institutional mandates, liquid-staking adoption and expectations for SOL, and the inflation reduction over this period was gradual and widely anticipated rather than sudden. The limited opportunity cost to staking may also have weakened the relationship historically. As Solana matures, more advanced use cases are expected to emerge which may trigger the correlation that theory would predict. The evidence does not support assuming that participation will fall in direct proportion to rewards.

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Implications for institutional stakers

The research draws four implications for institutional participants. Nominal staking rewards would be lower under SIMD-0550, particularly from the second year onwards, while lower issuance would reduce dilution and Solana’s future supply growth. Validator operating efficiency could become more important as inflationary rewards reduce. SIMD-0553 would primarily affect transaction-fee economics and validator costs, rather than staking rewards.

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Governance and implementation status

Neither proposal would become active simply because its technical specification has been published. SIMDs define how a proposed protocol change would be implemented and are reviewed through Solana’s technical process. For economic changes, stakeholders can also request a separate Solana Governance Proposal, or SGP, to provide a stake-weighted signal on whether the network should proceed.

SGP-0002 covers double disinflation and SGP-0003 covers the resource and inclusion fee. Support from at least 15% of active stake is required to trigger a community vote, which was triggered on 5 August 2026. Approval then requires at least two thirds, or 66.67%, of the stake voting For or Against, with abstentions excluded from the calculation. Because these are two separate proposals, each is decided on its own terms.

Even following governance support, implementation would still require compatible validator-client releases, testing and feature activation before either change could take effect on mainnet.

The specification also remains subject to change. On 14 August 2026 the proposal’s author opened an amendment to increase the base inclusion fee from 2,500 to 2,600 lamports per transaction. It cites an average of approximately 1.04 signatures per transaction, close to our own sample figure, and proposes the higher fee to offset the reduction in leader revenue. The amendment remains open, and the figures above reflect the unamended 2,500-lamport specification.

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The full report

Our full research on these proposals sets out the disinflation modelling behind SIMD-0550 and its implications for delegators and validators, the fee restructure under SIMD-0553, and the combined effect of both on SOL supply. We will make it available once the vote closes, updated to reflect the outcome. Institutional clients can contact the team to discuss either proposal in more detail at info@twinstake.io. 

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Disclaimer

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‍The analysis in this blog post reflects the proposals as specified and the information available at the time of publication. Both proposals remain subject to governance, technical review, implementation and activation, and their specifications, timing and economic effects may change. This blog post will not necessarily be updated to reflect subsequent developments.

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