At the end of last month, after that Solana governance vote passed, the Chinese community that same day quickly settled on a single line: SOL should print less. I’ve followed that line for most of the past half month. This week, I wanted to write it into my notes, so I went and queried the parameters on the mainnet as a quick check.
The answer on-chain hasn’t changed.
Solana mainnet’s getInflationGovernor is a public interface—anyone can call it. Today I read it out, and the taper field that controls the rate at which inflation decreases is still 0.15, exactly the same as before the vote. SGP-0002 is supposed to change that number to 0.30, and so far it hasn’t been executed on-chain.
The sticking point is public. Anza’s condition is that before adjusting the issuance rate, they must first land SIMD-0607—switch the calculation of staking rewards from floating-point numbers to integer fixed-point—otherwise different clients will produce slightly different results, and the chain will split. The version carrying this change is Agave v4.4. I checked the release page: up to September 18, what it has put out is still an alpha version. On the mainnet, only a handful of nodes are running this build; there’s no release date even for the official version.
So this is the current situation: a supply contraction that has already passed, but has no effective date. The SIMD-0607 change is still waiting for Anza and Firedancer to each provide a representative to sign off, and both client teams need to cut over together at the same epoch boundary—whoever is slower has to wait. SOL has outperformed the broader market this month, and the money is likely getting in through this gap.
First, let’s make the “outperformed” part clear. Over the past thirty days, SOL’s exchange rate versus Bitcoin and Ethereum both rose 12.6%, while during the same period those two big coins basically stayed in place on their own.
Looking only at one month, yes—it’s clearly leading.
If you stretch the window to ninety days, SOL’s exchange rate versus Ethereum is only up 0.7%, meaning it’s essentially flat. The recent period of SOL’s lead over Ethereum looks more like making up the missing chunk from earlier in the summer—it’s not really a brand-new valuation uplift. Bitcoin’s lead, on the other hand, has continued for three straight months. That line looks more solid.
Most explanations point to spot ETFs. The numbers don’t quite cooperate. The last time SOL spot ETFs saw a large inflow was in the week of August 28, with a net inflow of $153.87 million in that single week. By the week of September 18, it was down to just $13.2 million—cut down to about a small fraction of August’s level. Records of continuous net inflows are still technically hanging around, but in this same time, the coin price rose by 15%. Clearly, the buy orders didn’t come through that channel. The “existing holdings” explanation also can’t hold: the share of these funds’ holdings is only a bit over two percent of SOL’s circulating market value, and that position size can’t determine the relative strength over one month.
The technical picture also needs to be broken down. Alpenglow is this year’s biggest protocol change for Solana—it replaces the voting part in consensus with Votor. According to Anza’s schedule, starting September 28 the mainnet will enter functional activation; the effect will roll out step by step across epoch boundaries until October. The official “150 ms final confirmation” is given as a target value, but there’s no mainnet empirical validation. This build only has Votor; Rotor, which is responsible for block propagation, has been pushed into the later proposals. Eight days later, we’ll likely see headlines saying Solana has entered the millisecond era. It will be more reliable to verify again once the real-world data comes out. #Alpenglow
Back to that vote: the disagreement actually isn’t technical. Accelerating the decaying rate benefits people who hold their coins without moving them, while institutions living off staking yield pay the cost. Solana Company publicly opposed it: in its second-quarter revenue, 99.4% came from staking its own SOL holdings—this is a bill it can’t avoid.
Kraken initially voted against, but near the deadline it changed most votes to in favor; Galaxy switched from abstaining to being just over half in favor. In the end, the “yes” votes barely cleared the two-thirds threshold. It was only short of passing by a single large-holder changing their mind. That vote structure itself signals that within Solana, there still isn’t consensus on reducing issuance. It looks more like a time-line-driven tradeoff—shifting some cash flow from staking participants to long-term coin holders. #Solana
For this month’s excess returns: the ETF-related portion can be written off directly. The high-beta rebound explains part of it. The biggest remaining piece is that the market paid in advance for a supply contraction that hasn’t gone into effect yet. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with pricing early—markets have been doing this all along. But the time value of that money is entirely staked on when Agave v4.4 finally turns into the official version. And right now there’s no date for that—only a sentence that says the technical work must be done first.
There are two scenarios that would overturn my claim. One is if weekly ETF inflows return to the August-level magnitude, and the price keeps leading at the same time—then it would indicate the buy orders really are coming from that channel, and I simply underweighted it. The other is if v4.4 becomes the official version and the taper on-chain flips to 0.30—then that expectation would be fulfilled, and the time mismatch I’m worried about would no longer hold.
Today’s market action is conveniently putting this story through a stress test. $SOL fell 5.2% over 24 hours, with Bitcoin dropping much less over the same period. When the high-beta looked so good during the upswing, it would be just as painful when it reverses. September has been passing through two things that were already weighing on the market: rate hikes and disappointment around crypto legislation. People holding high-beta positions and staying close to the trend in such days don’t have it easy.
If you want to follow this thesis, rather than staring at price every day, a more efficient method is to query the mainnet getInflationGovernor yourself once every few days to see whether taper has moved from 0.15 to 0.30. It’s a public interface—you don’t need to trust anyone’s retelling. If it actually changes, then the logic of reduced issuance finally lands on-chain. If it stays the same, then this price today is still just paying for a promise.
The answer on-chain hasn’t changed.
Solana mainnet’s getInflationGovernor is a public interface—anyone can call it. Today I read it out, and the taper field that controls the rate at which inflation decreases is still 0.15, exactly the same as before the vote. SGP-0002 is supposed to change that number to 0.30, and so far it hasn’t been executed on-chain.
The sticking point is public. Anza’s condition is that before adjusting the issuance rate, they must first land SIMD-0607—switch the calculation of staking rewards from floating-point numbers to integer fixed-point—otherwise different clients will produce slightly different results, and the chain will split. The version carrying this change is Agave v4.4. I checked the release page: up to September 18, what it has put out is still an alpha version. On the mainnet, only a handful of nodes are running this build; there’s no release date even for the official version.
So this is the current situation: a supply contraction that has already passed, but has no effective date. The SIMD-0607 change is still waiting for Anza and Firedancer to each provide a representative to sign off, and both client teams need to cut over together at the same epoch boundary—whoever is slower has to wait. SOL has outperformed the broader market this month, and the money is likely getting in through this gap.
First, let’s make the “outperformed” part clear. Over the past thirty days, SOL’s exchange rate versus Bitcoin and Ethereum both rose 12.6%, while during the same period those two big coins basically stayed in place on their own.
Looking only at one month, yes—it’s clearly leading.
If you stretch the window to ninety days, SOL’s exchange rate versus Ethereum is only up 0.7%, meaning it’s essentially flat. The recent period of SOL’s lead over Ethereum looks more like making up the missing chunk from earlier in the summer—it’s not really a brand-new valuation uplift. Bitcoin’s lead, on the other hand, has continued for three straight months. That line looks more solid.
Most explanations point to spot ETFs. The numbers don’t quite cooperate. The last time SOL spot ETFs saw a large inflow was in the week of August 28, with a net inflow of $153.87 million in that single week. By the week of September 18, it was down to just $13.2 million—cut down to about a small fraction of August’s level. Records of continuous net inflows are still technically hanging around, but in this same time, the coin price rose by 15%. Clearly, the buy orders didn’t come through that channel. The “existing holdings” explanation also can’t hold: the share of these funds’ holdings is only a bit over two percent of SOL’s circulating market value, and that position size can’t determine the relative strength over one month.
The technical picture also needs to be broken down. Alpenglow is this year’s biggest protocol change for Solana—it replaces the voting part in consensus with Votor. According to Anza’s schedule, starting September 28 the mainnet will enter functional activation; the effect will roll out step by step across epoch boundaries until October. The official “150 ms final confirmation” is given as a target value, but there’s no mainnet empirical validation. This build only has Votor; Rotor, which is responsible for block propagation, has been pushed into the later proposals. Eight days later, we’ll likely see headlines saying Solana has entered the millisecond era. It will be more reliable to verify again once the real-world data comes out. #Alpenglow
Back to that vote: the disagreement actually isn’t technical. Accelerating the decaying rate benefits people who hold their coins without moving them, while institutions living off staking yield pay the cost. Solana Company publicly opposed it: in its second-quarter revenue, 99.4% came from staking its own SOL holdings—this is a bill it can’t avoid.
Kraken initially voted against, but near the deadline it changed most votes to in favor; Galaxy switched from abstaining to being just over half in favor. In the end, the “yes” votes barely cleared the two-thirds threshold. It was only short of passing by a single large-holder changing their mind. That vote structure itself signals that within Solana, there still isn’t consensus on reducing issuance. It looks more like a time-line-driven tradeoff—shifting some cash flow from staking participants to long-term coin holders. #Solana
For this month’s excess returns: the ETF-related portion can be written off directly. The high-beta rebound explains part of it. The biggest remaining piece is that the market paid in advance for a supply contraction that hasn’t gone into effect yet. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with pricing early—markets have been doing this all along. But the time value of that money is entirely staked on when Agave v4.4 finally turns into the official version. And right now there’s no date for that—only a sentence that says the technical work must be done first.
There are two scenarios that would overturn my claim. One is if weekly ETF inflows return to the August-level magnitude, and the price keeps leading at the same time—then it would indicate the buy orders really are coming from that channel, and I simply underweighted it. The other is if v4.4 becomes the official version and the taper on-chain flips to 0.30—then that expectation would be fulfilled, and the time mismatch I’m worried about would no longer hold.
Today’s market action is conveniently putting this story through a stress test. $SOL fell 5.2% over 24 hours, with Bitcoin dropping much less over the same period. When the high-beta looked so good during the upswing, it would be just as painful when it reverses. September has been passing through two things that were already weighing on the market: rate hikes and disappointment around crypto legislation. People holding high-beta positions and staying close to the trend in such days don’t have it easy.
If you want to follow this thesis, rather than staring at price every day, a more efficient method is to query the mainnet getInflationGovernor yourself once every few days to see whether taper has moved from 0.15 to 0.30. It’s a public interface—you don’t need to trust anyone’s retelling. If it actually changes, then the logic of reduced issuance finally lands on-chain. If it stays the same, then this price today is still just paying for a promise.