The Solana Foundation announced Wednesday that on-chain governance is now live on the network, allowing validators to propose and vote on protocol-level decisions through a system called Solana Governance Proposals (SGP).
According to the foundation’s announcement thread, the mechanism is fully on-chain, stake-focused, and verified by Merkle proofs. Validators with at least 100,000 SOL delegates can open proposals, and proposals become available for voting only if they clear 15% of cluster staking support. Delegators who disagree with how a validator votes, or whose validator did not vote at all, can use their stake weight to override that vote.
Markle Verified Voting
The system runs on two on-chain programs described in the project’s technical documentation. NCN (Node Consensus Network), a snapshot program that establishes verifiable stake weights, and a voting program called svmgov. Whitelisted operators build their own Merkle trees of validator stakes from the Solana ledger and vote on legitimate snapshots. Once agreed, the consensus result will be published on-chain, and validators will use Merkle proofs when voting to prove their stake weight against the consensus result.
According to the governance document, the two on-chain programs are deployed as “ncn-snapshot” and “svmgov,” and the snapshot program builds a canonical stake tree that the voting program checks on every vote.
Comparison of SGP and SIMD
The SGP exists in addition to the Solana Improvement Document (SIMD) that process core developers already use to modify technical protocols. According to the solana-governance-proposals repository, SIMD answers “how exactly do we do this” determined by technical reviews from core developers, while SGP answers “should we do this” determined by stake-focused on-chain voting. By default, decisions are left to core developers and SIMD processes. SGP will only break that path if the 15% stake support threshold is met and will not block SIMD from moving forward on its own.
The Foundation directed validators and delegates to view its governance dashboard, documentation, and svmgov codebase to begin participating.
The launch follows a series of efforts by the Solana Foundation to engage institutions and validators, including native payment rails for subscriptions and benefits and MoneyGram joining the network as validators.
