Solana Fixed Governance Bug Before Narrow Inflation Vote

A flaw in Solana’s on-chain governance program, svmgov, could have pushed SGP-0002 below its approval threshold if it had not been fixed before voting began.

The proposal received 67.00% support, clearing the 66.67% threshold by 0.33 percentage point. Under the earlier program behavior, a reconstruction put support at 66.65% — 0.02 percentage point below the threshold.

The counterfactual tally omitted 212 delegator vote overrides representing 2.81 million SOL. The affected stakers had delegated to 102 validators that did not vote. The estimate describes what could have happened if the flaw had remained; the recorded result was unaffected because the fix was live before voting opened.

svmgov allows stakers to cast an independent vote instead of following the choice of a validator to whom they delegated. Under the old behavior, an override submitted before the validator voted was held for later counting. If that validator never voted, the staker’s choice could be left out of the final tally. The potential impact therefore depended on both the timing of a delegator’s vote and the validator’s nonparticipation.

Asymmetric Research reported the flaw to the Solana Foundation on July 10. A fix reached Solana mainnet on Aug. 3, before SGP-0002 voting opened Aug. 24.

SGP-0002 endorsed doubling the annual rate at which SOL inflation declines, from 15% to 30%, while keeping the long-term inflation target at 1.5%. The vote endorsed that direction, but a separate technical approval and activation process is still required to implement the change.