Solana inflation cut is premature, SOL Strategies CEO says

Solana's plan to double its annual disinflation rate has drawn criticism from SOL Strategies CEO Michael Hubbard, who has argued that the network's current inflation of about 4% to 4.5% does not justify an accelerated reduction.
Summary

• SGP-0002 passed with 67% support, narrowly clearing Solana's two-thirds threshold.
• Hubbard said the inflation change was rushed and unlikely to produce a measurable effect on SOL's price.
• SOL Strategies' CEO said SGP-0003 passed under the voting rules communicated before ballots opened.
• The Nasdaq-listed infrastructure company operates Solana validators, staking services and a SOL treasury.

Solana inflation cut has come too early, Hubbard says

Michael Hubbard, CEO of Solana infrastructure and treasury company SOL Strategies, told crypto.news that the inflation change was premature and had been pushed through before its effects on network participants were fully understood.

SGP-0002, known as Double Disinflation, would increase the rate at which Solana's inflation falls each year from 15% to 30%. The proposal retained the network's existing terminal inflation rate of 1.5% but shortened the estimated time needed to reach it from 5.7 years to about 2.8 years.

According to Solana's final governance tally, SGP-0002 received 176.29 million SOL in support, equal to 67% of participating stake. Another 66.19 million SOL opposed the proposal, while 20.63 million SOL abstained. Participation reached 60.7% of the eligible stake.
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The result exceeded the published 66.67% approval requirement by roughly one-third of a percentage point. As previously reported, the proposal could remove an estimated 18.9 million SOL from projected issuance over six years, equivalent to about 2.6% of the supply expected under the existing schedule.

Hubbard said inflation of about 4% to 4.5% was "not that extreme" and rejected the view that issuance was the main force holding back SOL's market performance. In his assessment, calling inflation the problem offers an overly simple explanation for the token's price movements.

Staking rewards also remain inside the Solana economy, Hubbard noted, because SOL issued to stakers is commonly restaked rather than sold immediately. Based on that structure, he said cutting issuance would not produce an immediate or easily measured change in SOL's price.

Galaxy Research raised a related concern before the vote, warning that lower staking rewards could make validator operations less attractive if increased fee income or SOL price appreciation failed to offset the lost revenue. The firm also said frequent changes to established economic parameters could make financial planning more difficult for validators and other businesses.

Hubbard's company has direct exposure to the issue. SOL Strategies operates Solana validators, provides staking services, and manages a SOL treasury. Its earnings can therefore be affected by staking rewards, validator revenue, and changes in the value of SOL.

SGP-0003 vote has opened a dispute over abstentions

Alongside his concerns about inflation, Hubbard questioned how Solana officials interpreted the result of SGP-0003, the Resource and Inclusion Fee proposal.

The official final tally gave SGP-0003 53.9% support, with 18.92% voting against it and 27.18% abstaining. Under the formula displayed in Solana's current governance documents, abstentions count toward both quorum and the denominator used to calculate approval, leaving the proposal below the required two-thirds level.

Hubbard argued that the calculation method communicated when voting began treated abstentions differently. Under that interpretation, abstentions helped meet quorum but were excluded when calculating the share of decisive votes cast in favor or against.

Excluding abstentions, SGP-0003 secured approximately 74% of the stake that selected either option, enough to exceed the two-thirds requirement. Hubbard therefore considers the proposal approved under the rules participants were originally given, even though he believes rejection may produce a better practical result.

Solana Compass stated before the ballot that SGP-0003 needed 66.67% of the combined "for" and "against" stake and that abstentions would not affect the outcome. An Aug. 9 report on the tokenomics debate also described the calculation as excluding abstentions from decisive stake.

The Solana Constitution currently says the opposite. Article IV states that the approval denominator consists of "For + Against + Abstain," while the repository's voting policy repeats that abstaining stake counts as participation without contributing to the "for" tally.

According to Hubbard, applying a different calculation after voting started moved the goalposts for validators and delegators. He said procedural integrity required using the rules presented when the ballot opened, regardless of whether the resulting proposal was good policy.

Resource fees could add costs for Solana applications

SGP-0003 supported a redesign of Solana's transaction charges through SIMD-0553. Solana currently charges a base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature, with half burned and half paid to the block-producing validator.

Under SIMD-0553, transactions would instead carry a 2,500-lamport inclusion fee paid to the block producer and a separate fee based on the computing resources requested. The protocol would burn the resource-based portion in full.

Using network activity from May 2026, the proposal's authors estimated that daily SOL burns could rise from about 648 SOL to between 1,500 and 1,800 SOL during the first stage. Later stages could increase the estimated range to between 3,750 and 4,500 SOL and eventually between 7,500 and 9,000 SOL.

Hubbard said the model would introduce unnecessary transaction complexity. Resource-heavy applications, trading routers, and order-book operators could face higher costs because fees would depend on how much computing capacity their transactions request.

SOL Strategies' CEO also raised concerns about the financial interests of the proposal's supporters. SIMD-0553 was written by Cavey of Temporal, a research and development company that says it built HumidiFi, one of Solana's dominant proprietary automated market makers.

Hubbard alleged that the proposed fee structure could benefit the associated propAMM while imposing higher costs on direct competitors. No independent transaction-level study cited in his statement established the size of any competitive advantage, making the conflict claim Hubbard's assessment rather than a confirmed effect of the proposal.

Before the vote, a simulation hosted by Sandwiched.me examined the expected cost for routers, applications, and propAMMs at different resource-fee rates. The dashboard showed that the effect varied according to transaction design, requested compute limits, and whether applications optimized their resource use.

Solana's earlier inflation vote also divided validators

Debate over issuance did not begin with SGP-0002. In March 2025, Solana validators considered SIMD-0228, which proposed replacing the fixed inflation schedule with a rate that responded to staking participation.

Under the model, inflation would fall when a large share of SOL was staked and rise when participation dropped enough to create security concerns. The proposal received 61.39% support but failed to clear the required two-thirds threshold.

Ahead of that ballot, earlier coverage reported that Solana's annual inflation stood near 4.6% and was already set to decline by 15% each year until reaching 1.5%. Critics warned that a sharp reduction could weaken smaller validators by lowering rewards while fixed hardware and voting expenses remained.

Hubbard's position differs from supporting the existing inflation level permanently. He said neither SGP-0002 nor SGP-0003 was critical to Solana's future and described the timing and process as more concerning than the long-term policy goals.

For U.S. investors, the proposals also affect exposure held through SOL Strategies shares. The Canadian company trades on Nasdaq under the ticker STKE and on the Canadian Securities Exchange under HODL, giving American shareholders indirect exposure to Solana validator income, staking activity and the company's SOL holdings.

According to the company, Hubbard became its full-time CEO in 2026 after serving as interim chief executive from October 2025. SOL Strategies' Nasdaq listing began under STKE in September 2025, replacing its previous OTCQB trading arrangement.

SGP-0002 has provided a governance mandate rather than an automatic change to issuance. SIMD-0550 still requires validator-client implementation, consistent inflation calculations across clients, and activation through a mainnet feature gate at an epoch boundary. Rewards earned before activation would remain unchanged, while the faster disinflation schedule would apply beginning with the following epoch.
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