Solana’s fee overhaul increases burn and makes resource hogs pay

Solana is preparing to change how it charges for computing resources on the network.

Solana Improvement Document (SIMD-0553) would make its most resource-intensive users pay more while cutting the costs for simpler transactions. As a bonus, it would increase SOL’s burn rate in stages — and one day could even help make it deflationary.

Cavey, a researcher at Solana infrastructure firm Temporal and author of the proposal, tells Magazine that fees currently don’t reflect the real costs:

“If I submit a transaction that does nothing versus a transaction that burns 200 million CPU cycles, I’m charged the same amount.”

This proposal would change that by tying fees more closely to the resources each transaction requests. Rather than going to validators, the resource fee would be burned, removing SOL from circulation.

Of course, reducing validator income has not been welcomed by all. Contributor bji argues on github:

“I like the aspect of this proposal that gives tx submitters extra incentive to be accurate with CU limits. Everything else I’m meh to negative on. ‘More burn’ should not be a goal. Validator incomes should not be arbitrarily reduced.”

SIMD-0553 entered Solana’s new onchain governance process in early August and cleared its initial support phase on August 4.