Solana Tops $100 as Two Proposals Aim to Cut SOL Emissions

Solana traded above $100 on Friday at its highest level since January, and it led the larger tokens through a week when almost everything rose. Two proposals to slow the creation of new SOL are the reason the trade press gives for the move. SIMD-0550 would double the annual cut to Solana's inflation rate. SIMD-0553 rewrites the network fee so that part of every transaction is destroyed instead of paid out. Neither has a published final tally, and the price itself is quoted at three different levels depending on the hour of the snapshot.

Three clocks, three prices

The Crypto Times, writing late Thursday and updating just after 01:00 UTC, had SOL up 11.56% over 24 hours at about $107.15, off a daily low near $95 and more than 24% higher on the week. The Cryptonomist put it at $106.92 at 07:17 UTC on Friday, with a daily relative strength index of 80.51, deep in the range chartists call overbought. CoinDesk's Friday wrap, timestamped 04:40 UTC, had solana at about $101, up 4% on the day and 20% on the week. Those readings cover different 24-hour windows on different venues and they do not reconcile into one number. Every account agrees on the ranking. Solana moved further than bitcoin, ether or XRP.

What the two proposals change

SIMD-0550 is the simpler of the pair. Solana's issuance already declines on a schedule, and the proposal doubles the annual reduction from 15% to 30%, reaching the 1.5% terminal rate in 2029 instead of 2032. Solana Compass calculates that as roughly 18.9 million fewer SOL over six years. SIMD-0553 goes after the fee instead. The flat 5,000-lamport charge per signature would give way to a 2,500-lamport inclusion fee paid to the block leader, plus a resource fee priced on the compute a transaction requests and burned in full. Solana Compass puts the combined effect at about 1.05% net annual supply growth by 2029, under the network's own terminal target.

Stakers pay for it

The yield on locking SOL up is the other side of lower issuance. 21Shares, whose analysis blockchainreporter carried on Thursday, reads the pair as halving that yield inside two years, from about 5.25% to roughly 3%.

The proposals would "roughly halve staking yield and cut SOL issuance by $1.4 billion over six years," the 21Shares analysis said.

The same piece projects two validators falling into unprofitability in the first year and 30 by the third. Burn estimates are quoted three ways. Solana Compass has daily burns of about 648 SOL climbing to between 7,500 and 9,000; blockchainreporter starts the same climb at 600 to 800 SOL. CoinDesk priced the change in early August at roughly $47,000 of SOL burned a day rising to about $650,000. Those are one estimate valued at different moments, not competing totals.

Nobody has published a result

The accounts of where the vote stands split badly. Solana Compass wrote on 8 August that an eleven-epoch formal voting window had opened three days earlier, after SGP-0003 crossed a signalling threshold of 65.16 million SOL, 15% of the 432.65 million then staked; that window would have closed around 18 August. Blockchainreporter wrote on 27 August that SIMD-0550 had been in live voting since 23 August, and that SIMD-0553 was approved and merged on 20 July. Both need a two-thirds stake-weighted supermajority. We could not establish which account describes the live state. No final tally for SIMD-0550 had been published at the time of writing.

Money has been arriving alongside the argument. Solana exchange-traded funds took $74.88 million over seven consecutive days on The Crypto Times' count, and BeInCrypto logged $60.91 million on 27 August alone, part of a wider run in which US spot bitcoin funds posted a seventh straight day of inflows earlier in the month. The chain has had a busy quarter otherwise, having cut its slot time to 350 milliseconds in the first such reduction since genesis. What holders do not have is a vote result, a date for one, or any figure showing whether the buying survives the week.