Key Takeaways:
- Solana’s inflation issues are examined by Galaxy Research, which has put forward the MESA consensus mechanism as a remedy.
- The initiative would hasten the path to achieving Solana’s goal of a 1.5% terminal inflation rate.
- MESA lets validators cast ballots across several proposed deflation rates rather than make a dichotomous yes–no choice.
- Under this new scheme, a weighted average is determined from the preferences of the validators.
- The proposal comes on the heels of a March 2025 governance ballot that underscored the network’s consensus challenges.
A New Perspective on a Contentious Problem
Galaxy Research has put forth a possible breakthrough in the continuing Solana inflation debate. On 17 April, the research firm introduced a proposal that introduced a fresh strategy, Multiple Election Stake-Weight Aggregation (MESA), aimed at reshaping how the network decides on SOL’s emission curve.
The timing could hardly be more critical. After the May 2024 deployment of SIMD-96, which rerouted validator priority fees instead of burning them, Solana’s annualized inflation rate shot up by 30.5%. As a result, the daily SOL burn decline dropped from roughly 18,000 down to 1,000 tokens.
Reasons Behind the Failure of Traditional Governance
Although most observers agree that present inflation levels are excessive, the Solana community has still been unable to forge consensus on possible adjustments. The problem was made clear in March 2025, when SIMD-228—aiming to dynamically adjust inflation based on staking participation—fell short of passage despite securing 56.39% approval, just shy of the 66.67% required to pass.
In the wake of the defeated proposal, industry figures drew attention to the system’s deficiencies. As Helius Labs CEO Mert Müntaz stressed the need for more sophisticated governance mechanisms, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko underscored the critical role of actively participating validators in these decisions.
Operation of MESA: A Layered Decision Framework
Galaxy’s MESA proposal breaks sharply with binary voting by implementing a market-driven mechanism that presents several option choices. Rather than opting for straightforward yes-or-no decisions, validators can pick among four predetermined deflation rates (15%, 17%, 20%, or 25%).
It functions through four principal steps:
- Enabling validators to distribute their staked votes among a set of options.
- If the requisite thresholds are satisfied, the system would compute a weighted average of all “yes” selections.
- Establishing a fixed disinflationary path under this combined input.
- Take, for instance, the scenario outlined in the proposal: If 75% of validators vote for the 15% deflation rate, 50% select a 30%, and 45% cast their votes for a 33% threshold, the resulting effective deflation rate settles at 30.6%.
Several Implementation Questions Still Remain
Although the proposal presents a compelling blueprint, numerous implementation issues still need community feedback. Among these considerations are how refined the spectrum of voting options ought to be, whether to retain the current quorum thresholds, and whether using a basic weighted-average calculation represents the most suitable approach.
Significantly, Galaxy Research acknowledges that its proposal intends to propose a governance framework rather than recommend any particular inflation rate.
The Road Ahead
Should it be implemented, the MESA framework would still maintain predictability while offering validators a wider array of finer-grained preference options within a single process. Such an approach may hasten Solana’s path to the 1.5% terminal inflation rate and could shave roughly 1 year from the current projected 7.4-year window from epoch 772.
As the Solana community keeps refining its governance structures, this proposal constitutes a critical stride toward making decisions on the network both more effective and better representative.