Crypto insight provider Galaxy Research introduced a new voting mechanism, Multiple Election Stake-Weight Aggregation (MESA), to reduce the inflation rate of Solana (SOL). The project developers’ sole intention is to take an innovative approach to deciding the future of the SOL emission curve, allowing “validators to vote on multiple deflation rates and settling on the aggregate as the outcome.”
The research firm specified that the MESA proposal will be a “more market-based approach to agreeing on the rate of future SOL emissions.” The SOL emission curve determines how quickly tokens are created into circulation, particularly as a reward for validators and stakers.
How is MESA different from SIMD 0228?
In contrast to the previous proposal, SIMD 0228, the MESA proposal sheds more light on flexibility over voting, where validators can choose several options (multiple inflation rates). Each vote is calculated by how much SOL the validators have staked, and an average of the inflation rates voted is considered the final inflation rate.
Last month, the Solana Improvement Document (SIMD) 0228 proposal failed to pass as it did not cross the 66.67% cut-off value. 74% of the total staked SOL took part in the vote with 910 validators. The percentage of yes votes was 43.6%, whereas 27.4% voted no, and 3.3% of the validators did not vote, receiving only 61.4% approval. For the uninitiated, reducing inflation in cryptocurrency insinuates more power to the coin; if SOL’s inflation rate is low, it becomes more sustainable with long-term value. In crypto, inflation typically means more coins are produced over time. If inflation is high, the price of a coin goes down as supply and demand increase, and its value decreases.
A chart showing SOL’s inflation could hit a 1.5% terminal rate. Source: Galaxy
Importantly, Solana developers have already implemented a built-in disinflationary rate of 1.5%. However, validators can vote to determine at what rate the inflation should drop, starting from the current 15% inflation rate.
