Solana fee vote fails despite majority support, revealing Anatoly Yakovenko's influence

The Solana SGP-0003 fee vote finalized on August 28, 2026, failing to pass despite receiving 53.90% approval. The proposal fell 33.83 million SOL short of the required two-thirds majority because the official governance system counted abstentions in the denominator. Although co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko supported the initial rate, voters rejected the bundled three-stage economic package, which included SIMD-0553 fee changes. Major operators like Jupiter opposed the measure, while Figment supported it.

SGP-0003 vote outcome

• ▪The Solana SGP-0003 vote had 265.015 million SOL participate, representing 61.14% of the 433.486 million SOL snapshot, which comfortably cleared the quorum.
• ▪The Solana SGP-0003 proposal achieved 53.90% approval, falling approximately 33.83 million SOL short of the required two-thirds majority.
• ▪The Solana fee vote on SGP-0003, which finalized on August 28, 2026, failed to pass despite receiving a majority of participating stake support.
• ▪The Solana SGP-0003 proposal vote finalized with 142.844 million SOL in favor, 50.146 million SOL against, and 72.025 million SOL abstaining across 1,152 voters.

Abstention counting rules

• ▪The official Solana governance system counted abstentions in the denominator for the SGP-0003 vote, following the current governance FAQ and ratified Constitution.
• ▪The frozen text of the Solana SGP-0003 proposal stated that no quorum applied and excluded abstentions from its approval calculation, which conflicted with the official rules.

Yakovenko agenda-setting influence

• ▪Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko publicly supported SGP-0003 on August 25, 2026, specifically backing an initial resource-fee rate of one-tenth of a lamport per requested cost unit.
• ▪Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko argued on August 27, 2026, that validator revenue encourages more people to stake, placing validator economics within the network's security model.
• ▪Following the failure of SGP-0003, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko proposed splitting the reform into two separate proposals to isolate areas of agreement.

Resource-fee economic package design

• ▪The technical plan under Solana's SIMD-0553 proposed replacing the 5,000-lamport signature fee with a 2,500-lamport inclusion fee per transaction paid to the block leader.
• ▪The Solana SIMD-0553 design proposed adding a resource fee based on the requested scheduler cost of a transaction and burning that resource fee in full.
• ▪The Solana SGP-0003 proposal bundled a three-stage path that would eventually lift the resource-fee rate to one-quarter and then one-half of a lamport.

Validator coalition dynamics

• ▪The decentralized exchange Jupiter allocated approximately 11.78 million SOL in opposition to the Solana SGP-0003 proposal.
• ▪Prominent Solana operators and delegated-stake holders supporting SGP-0003 included Figment, Staking Facilities, Kiln, and P2P.org.
• ▪Prominent Solana operators and delegated-stake holders opposing SGP-0003 included Jupiter, Drift, Bitwise Onchain Solutions, and Forward Industries.

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