Solana Co-Founder Yakovenko Calls For New SOL Disinflation Push

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has called for another attempt to accelerate SOL disinflation, after a new GitHub discussion proposed improving Solana’s tokenomics through a resource-based base fee that would be fully burned. The debate puts SOL issuance, fee burn mechanics and validator economics back at the center of Solana governance after last year’s failed SIMD-0228 vote.

The author rejected a simple across-the-board base fee increase, arguing it would hit the wrong parts of the network. Retail users and searchers often pay priority fees far above the base signature fee, while validators and market makers send high transaction volumes where the base fee is a larger share of cost. “So, increasing the base fee outright and uniformly would threaten decentralization,” the post said, citing pressure on validator profitability, and would also threaten Solana’s spot market structure by increasing market maker fixed costs.

Instead, the proposal calls for a resource-based base fee that would be entirely burned. Each Solana transaction already has a cost profile based on compute units, data loaded, write locks and other variables. The suggested mechanism would charge and burn 0.1 lamport per cost unit requested, with the author saying the figure was chosen to avoid materially increasing costs for market makers, whose oracle updates typically request fewer than 2,500 cost units.

The proposal’s examples show sharply different effects depending on transaction type. A Shekel-to-SOL swap via OKX would rise from a 5,000 base fee plus 130,980 priority fee to include an additional 82,432 new burned base fee, a 60% increase. A SOL-to-TRANSCEND transaction via Pump with no priority fee would see costs rise 639%. A USDC-to-99% transaction via DFlow with a large priority fee would rise only 2%, while a Zerofi oracle update would rise 3%.

The draft estimated that, assuming most blocks request 50 million to 300 million total cost units, the mechanism could burn roughly 1,080 to 6,480 SOL per day, with the author’s “hunch” closer to 2,160 SOL per day. That would come on top of the current roughly 648 SOL daily base-fee burn, but still sit well below estimated inflation of about 60,000 SOL per day.

Commenters immediately focused on whether the proposed burn would be large enough to matter. One reply argued the aggregate estimate needed tighter empirical support, while another provided recent requested compute-unit data suggesting current usage could put the burn in the 1,500 to 1,800 SOL per day range. Another commenter warned that, with Solana inflation still around 3.8%, the mechanism would deflate only about 0.1% at current requested units and would need roughly 10 times current demand to approach 1% deflation, assuming fee demand did not taper.

SIMD-0411 proposes increasing Solana’s disinflation rate from 15% to 30%, accelerating the decline in SOL issuance while leaving the terminal inflation rate at 1.5%. Its authors model the change as bringing Solana to terminal inflation in 3.1 years, around early 2029, rather than 6.2 years, around early 2032. They estimate a reduction of 22.3 million SOL in emissions over six years, or about 3.2% lower supply than under the current path.

At press time, SOL traded at $81.41.