Solana Launches Onchain Governance: Validators Vote on SGPs

What happened

Solana’s onchain governance has been live since 1 July 2026. Validators can now submit, support and decide core protocol questions via Solana Governance Proposals (SGPs) — fully onchain, stake-weighted, and verified by Merkle proof against an onchain stake snapshot. The tooling lives at governance.solana.com with documentation and open code.

How the process works

Proposing: a validator vote account needs at least 100,000 SOL staked to take an SGP onchain.
Support phase: the proposal then needs backing from at least 15% of active stake before it enters voting.
Voting: a proposal passes when “For” votes reach at least 66.67% of For+Against stake. There is no quorum rule.
Delegator override: individual stakers can override their validator’s vote using their stake account’s Merkle proof — their delegation then counts the way the delegator voted.

Context: SGP alongside SIMD

SGPs do not replace the technical SIMDs — they complement them: an SGP settles the directional question of whether Solana should pursue a path, while a SIMD specifies how a change is built. Directional debates such as disinflation (see SIMD-550) now get a formalized, transparent onchain process instead of votes scattered across channels. Earlier emission debates like SIMD-228 showed how contested such questions can be.

For stakers, the practical takeaway: choosing a validator is now also a governance decision — and anyone who disagrees with their validator can vote themselves via the override. What to look for when choosing: Solana validator selection.

Note: This is reporting, not investment advice.

What to watch

The first SGP to clear the 15% support threshold, and how high participation turns out
How many delegators actually use the override
Whether contested topics such as disinflation are formalized as early SGPs