Helius CEO Secured Votes in Final Moments Necessary to Reduce Inflation on Solana Network

Solana network validators reached a major milestone by passing the Solana Governance Proposal No. 0002 (SGP-0002) in the first vote of its kind.

SGP-0002, titled "Double Disinflation," proposed cutting the inflation schedule by increasing the disinflation rate from the current -15% to 30%.

The proposal, which seemed unlikely to pass just hours before the vote concluded, managed to secure support from 176.29 million $SOL (67%) of validators, while 66.19 million $SOL (25.16%) voted against it. 20.63 million $SOL (7.84%) abstained.

Mert Mumtaz, co-founder and CEO of Helius — a service provider and validator specializing in Solana — warned that the proposal would fail and criticized validators haphazardly voting against it "under the false pretense that this somehow preserves extra income for them via staking yield."

Mumtaz called this logic "mathematical nonsense," stating that "those who prioritize quantity of an asset over its value should immediately move to Venezuela and tell other $SOL holders how that works out."

However, not all validators opposed the inflation change for this reason. Everstake emphasized that it voted "against" because it disagreed with "the pace of the proposed change, the disproportionate impact it may have on smaller validators, the pressure it could put on staking participation and delegates, and the negative scenarios that remain unaddressed."

Despite this, Mumtaz's persistence caused Kraken to reconsider and switch its vote to "for," which had enough influence on the outcome, and the proposal passed by a narrow margin. "After 500 calls over the last few hours, we got all the votes in the final seconds and passed the disinflation proposal by a hair," he celebrated.

Two other proposals put to a vote saw mixed results: the vote on the Solana Constitution (SGP-0001) passed comfortably, while SGP-0003, titled "Resource Fees and Inclusion," was not adopted, avoiding the implementation of a new transaction fee model with a burn percentage.