Staked

SIMD-228 was a historic milestone for crypto. Even though our proposal was technically defeated by the vote, this was a major victory for the Solana ecosystem and its governance process. Over 74% of stake turned up to vote on the proposal. Yes votes were 43.6% of stake, no votes were 27.4% and abstains were 3.3%. To put that in context, SIMD-228 was the biggest crypto governance vote ever—by both number of participants and participating market cap of any ecosystem, chain, or network. For context, Solana's market cap during the SIMD-228 governance debate was comparable to Bitcoin's market cap during the mid-2017 blocksize wars. If this vote tells us one thing, it’s that the state of the Solana network is strong. This was a meaningful scaling stress test—a social, rather than technical, stress test—and the network passed despite a wide stratification of diverging opinions and interests. A huge diversity of participating stakeholders showed up and contributed: validators big and small, stakers, ecosystem developers, core contributors, the Foundation, investors, exchanges, wallets, custodians, applications, etc. Institutions were far more involved in SIMD 228 than any other governance proposal, clearly demonstrating Solana’s growing institutional adoption. Over 74% of stake voted across 910 individual validators. This vote is evidence that the network is thriving and fully decentralized. We uncovered many learnings along the way. These are clear opportunities for improvements to the voting process. I’ll expand my thoughts on those soon. I want to thank everyone who participated in the debate and put themselves in the public arena in service of advancing Solana governance. Public discourse is critically important and it takes a critical mass of people who really care. We ended up revising this proposal over 7 weeks on numerous occasions before it went to a final vote. That wouldn’t have been possible without the contributions of Solana’s passionate community. I also want to thank the community for voting. The community spoke, and we’re going to listen and incorporate the feedback we heard.