Solana's issuance was decided by vote. The network's validators enabled staking rewards and inflation through an on-chain governance process, setting a rate that began at 8 per cent a year, falls by 15 per cent of itself each year, and settles at a long-run 1.5 per cent a year. All of it is paid to validators and to holders who delegate stake to them.
Solana's issuance was decided by vote. The network's validators enabled staking rewards and inflation through an on-chain governance process, which set a rate starting at 8 per cent a year, falling by 15 per cent of itself annually, and settling at 1.5 per cent a year. Every newly issued token is paid to validators and to holders who delegate stake to them.
Who decides Solana's inflation?
Nobody decides it now. It was decided once, by the people running the network, and then written into the protocol.
The Solana documentation is direct about the mechanism: the community of validators voted to enable staking rewards and inflation through an on-chain governance process. That vote did not set a rate for a year. It set a curve, with three published parameters that then run on their own.
| Parameter | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Initial inflation rate | 8 per cent a year | Where issuance began when rewards were switched on |
| Dis-inflation rate | 15 per cent a year | The rate falls by 15 per cent of itself each year |
| Long-run inflation rate | 1.5 per cent a year | The floor the curve approaches and then holds |
Source: Solana documentation, inflation schedule.
Because the fall compounds, the early years drop quickly and the later ones barely move. There is no committee reviewing it, no quarterly meeting, and no discretionary adjustment. Changing any of the three numbers would mean changing the software that validators choose to run, and enough of them agreeing to run it.
That is a different arrangement to a central bank setting a policy rate, and a different arrangement again to a fixed cap. Solana has no maximum supply. It has a declining rate and a floor.
Where the new tokens go
All of it goes to the people securing the network. The documentation states that new issuance is distributed to validators and to the delegators who stake with them.
A validator is a machine that votes on the state of the chain. Running one is a real operating cost, and the vote transactions a validator sends to record its decisions carry fees like any other transaction.
A holder who runs no hardware can still take part by delegating. Delegation points stake at a chosen validator without transferring the tokens themselves, and the delegator receives a share of the rewards that stake earns, after whatever commission the validator charges. The stake is not handed over. It is counted.
We do not rate validators or recommend where to stake, and this page is descriptive only.
What the issuance is paying for
It pays for a machine that is much larger than the one a slower chain needs. That is the trade-off at the centre of the whole design.
Solana orders transactions using proof of history, described in the documentation as a stack of proofs, each proving that some data existed before the proof was created and that a precise duration passed since the previous one. That gives the network a clock it can agree on without messages travelling back and forth, and time is cut into slots, each with an assigned leader that produces a block.
Everything downstream of that clock is built for volume. The published validator requirements ask for a recent server-class processor, at least 256 gigabytes of error-correcting memory on a board that can take 512, three separate high-speed drives (one for account state, one for the ledger, one for snapshots) and a symmetric connection of at least two gigabits per second for a staked node. A chain that processes fewer transactions can be run on far less.
So the issuance is doing a specific job. It funds enough independent operators to run hardware of that class, in enough places, for the throughput to be worth having. Fewer operators would be cheaper to subsidise and worse to rely on.
Why has Solana gone down?
Seven times on the record, each with an official Solana outage report. In every case the chain did not lose data or reverse itself. It stopped agreeing, and so stopped confirming blocks.
| When | Cause | Chain halted for | Restart |
|---|---|---|---|
| December 2020 | A validator booted two instances and transmitted different blocks for the same slot, splitting the network into three minority partitions that could not repair from each other | About 6 hours | Operators coordinated a restart, needing agreement across 393 validators |
| September 2021 | Bot traffic after a token launch flooded the forwarder queue and exhausted validator memory | About 17 hours | Operators coordinated a restart, needing 80 per cent of active stake |
| April 2022 | Bots competing for a fixed-price mint pushed validators out of memory | About 7 hours | Operators coordinated a restart outside the protocol |
| June 2022 | A runtime bug let a failed transaction be processed twice, so validators disagreed on the block | About 4 and a half hours | Operators coordinated a restart outside the protocol |
| September 2022 | A misconfigured backup validator produced duplicate blocks, and a fault in fork selection stopped consensus advancing | About 8 hours | Operators coordinated a restart outside the protocol |
| February 2023 | A malfunctioning validator broadcast an abnormally large block that overwhelmed the network's deduplication logic | Almost 20 hours | Operators coordinated a restart outside the protocol |
| February 2024 | A legacy program's deploy-and-evict cycle triggered an endless recompile loop in the program cache | About 5 hours | Operators coordinated a restart on a patched release |
The restart detail is the part worth understanding. A halted chain cannot fix itself. Operators representing a large majority of the staked tokens have to agree, off-chain, on the last good point and come back online together. That is a human coordination step in a system otherwise designed to need none.
The failures came from two directions, not one. Three began with load: a network built to accept a very large volume of cheap transactions will at some point receive more of them than it can order in time. The other four were plain defects in consensus-critical code, which is what stopped the chain in December 2020, June 2022, September 2022 and February 2024.
What changed after the halts
The fixes targeted the sorting problem rather than the volume.
The clearest example is how congestion is priced. Solana charges a small base fee and allows an optional priority fee, paid per unit of computing work, which applies to the specific accounts a transaction writes to. That makes the market for block space local. Heavy demand for one popular token contract raises the cost of touching that contract, instead of pricing out unrelated payments elsewhere on the chain. The 2021 halt began with exactly that kind of concentrated flood.
Half of each base fee is destroyed rather than paid to the validator, which also means the fee cannot simply be recycled as an incentive to admit more traffic.
Alongside that, the software that decides which transactions a leader admits and in what order has been rewritten repeatedly, and the February 2024 fault was patched in a released version before the network came back.
The record since has improved materially. Solana Compass recorded thirty consecutive months without a network-wide outage as at August 2026. Two halts, both documented, both years apart, and a long clean run after the second. We make no claim about what happens next.
Where to look next
- Solana price in Australian dollars - the live figure, with its struck time and source.
- Crypto prices in AUD - the other coins we track, each with a plain factual summary.
- Glossary - short definitions for the terms used here, including staking and mid-market rate.
- Guides - the rest of our plain explanations of how things work.
General information about how a public blockchain issues tokens, not a recommendation to buy, hold or stake anything, and not a view on any network or service. Tradergy holds no positions, keeps no account and collects no personal data. Reviewed by the Tradergy editorial team, September 2026.
Sources
- Solana documentation - inflation schedule - initial 8 per cent rate, 15 per cent dis-inflation, 1.5 per cent long-run rate, the validator governance vote, and distribution to validators and delegators.
- Solana documentation - terminology - proof of history, slots, leaders and staking definitions.
- Solana documentation - transaction fees - base fees, prioritisation fees per compute unit, and the share of each base fee that is burned.
- Anza - validator operations requirements - the published hardware and bandwidth specification for running a validator.
- Mainnet Beta Stall - Postmortem, Solana Labs - the December 2020 halt.
- 9-14 Network Outage Initial Overview, Solana - the September 2021 halt.
- 4-30-22 Solana Mainnet Beta Outage Report, Solana - the April 2022 halt.
- 6-01-22 Solana Mainnet Beta Outage Report, Solana - the June 2022 halt.
- 9-30-22 Solana Mainnet Beta Outage Report, Solana - the September 2022 halt.
- 2-25-23 Solana Mainnet Beta Outage Report, Solana - the February 2023 halt.
- 02-06-24 Solana Mainnet Beta Outage Report, Solana - the February 2024 halt.
- Solana Status, Solana - the incident record, which shows no network-wide incident after 6 February 2024.
- Solana Marks 30 Consecutive Months Without a Network-Wide Outage, Solana Compass, August 2026 - secondary, and derived from the status page above.
Common questions
Who decides Solana's inflation rate?
Solana's validators did, through an on-chain governance vote that enabled staking rewards and inflation. The vote fixed the parameters in the protocol itself, so the rate now falls automatically each year without anyone deciding it again. Changing those parameters would take another change to the protocol that validators run.
Does Solana have a maximum supply?
No. Solana has no fixed cap on the number of tokens. Issuance follows a declining curve towards a long-run rate of 1.5 per cent a year and continues at that rate. Half of every base transaction fee is destroyed rather than paid out, which removes some tokens from supply.
How do Solana staking rewards work?
New tokens are issued each epoch and paid to validators in proportion to the stake behind them. A holder who runs no hardware can delegate stake to a validator, which does not transfer ownership of the tokens, and receives a share of that validator's rewards after the validator's commission.
Why does Solana go down?
Both network-wide halts had the same shape. Load or a software fault stopped validators agreeing on the chain's state, and the chain stopped producing confirmed blocks. In September 2021 automated traffic during a token launch exhausted validator memory. In February 2024 a bug in a program cache forced endless recompilation.
Is Solana still having outages?
Solana Compass recorded thirty consecutive months without a network-wide outage as at August 2026. The two documented network-wide halts were in September 2021 and February 2024. Both required validator operators to coordinate a restart outside the protocol, because the chain could not recover on its own.