Solana’s Tokenomics Debate Just Got Two Competing Proposals, and Anatoly Is Actively Shaping Both

A pseudonymous developer known as cavemanloverboy introduced SIMD-547, titled “Improving SOL tokenomics via a resource-based base fee,” in the solana-improvement-documents repository over the weekend, while SIMD-0411, originally proposed by Helius researchers Lostin and 0xIchigo in November 2025, has been reignited as an active community discussion. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has been engaging on both with technical input, making the next several weeks one of the most consequential tokenomics debates in Solana’s history.

SIMD-547 adds a new base fee on each transaction priced by compute units consumed, data loaded, write locks taken, and other resource costs. That fee is fully burned. The proposal’s argument is that Solana’s current burn mechanism is “incredibly tiny and insignificant,” destroying roughly 648 SOL per day even at a sustained throughput of 3,000 TPS, which makes SOL “a terrible asset to gain exposure to network activity.”

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

Estimates compiled by SolanaFloor put the daily burn under SIMD-547 between 10,800 and 64,800 SOL, a 16x to 100x increase.

At Solana’s current daily issuance through inflation of roughly 60,000 SOL, the upper end would push the network into net deflationary territory during periods of high usage. At an SOL price near $82.50, the daily burn value could rise from roughly $53,000 to between $891,000 and $5.35 million. SIMD-547 is explicitly structured to avoid penalizing retail users and searchers paying priority fees, with most of the new fee burden falling on validators and high-frequency market makers.

SIMD-0411 pulls a different lever entirely. It would update Solana’s existing inflation schedule by increasing the disinflation rate from -15% to -30% annually, effectively doubling the pace of inflation decline without adding any new fee mechanism.

Authored by Lostin and 0xIchigo of Helius, the proposal models a path to Solana’s terminal 1.5% inflation rate in 3.1 years (early 2029) instead of the current 6.2 years (early 2032). Total emissions would be reduced by 22.3 million SOL over six years, approximately $2.9 billion at current SOL prices. Nominal staking yields would decline from the current 6.41% to 5.04% in year one, 3.48% in year two, and 2.42% in year three. The Helius authors model validator profitability impact as muted: 10 validators out of 845 would shift from profitable or breakeven to unprofitable in year one, 27 in year two, and 47 in year three.

Anatoly Yakovenko has been actively shaping both proposals through technical commentary. On SIMD-0411, he proposed an adjustment to the Validator Admission Tax (VAT) parameter, writing: “Lower the VAT to be 1.25x the inflation rewards from stake of lowest paying validator in the 2k quorum, or 100 SOL if less than 2k are registered.” His engagement with SIMD-547 has been reported as supportive but represents shaping the design rather than a formal endorsement.

The proposals have generated sharp criticism in the community. SolStrategies CEO Michael Hubbard’s detailed response on SIMD-547 is one such example. Hubbard argues that while a resource-based fee structure is sound in principle, the proposed numbers result in only a 0.1% per annum reduction in SOL supply versus the current 3.8% inflation, a roughly 650,000 SOL annual change.

Hubbard also raised conflict-of-interest concerns, noting the proposal “explicitly calls out a specific transaction use case and appears designed around protecting that use case” — propAMM-style market-maker updates — while the proposer “operates a well-known propAMM on Solana.” His broader argument is that “SOL, the token, doesn’t matter that much” and that the focus should be on stimulating the Solana economy rather than adjusting monetary policy, comparing SOL to a national currency and the broader Solana ecosystem to a national economy.

Neither proposal has been implemented.

Both would need to pass through Solana’s standard validator vote and protocol upgrade process before becoming active. SIMD-0411 had previously stalled in December after Galaxy Research signaled it would likely be withdrawn without a vote; its return to active discussion represents a meaningful governance shift. SOL traded near $81.50 at the time of the debate, down sharply from highs reached last summer and underperforming HYPE and bitcoin throughout 2026.