Solana is preparing to change how it charges for computing resources on the network. Under Solana Improvement Document SIMD-0553, the network's most resource-intensive users would pay more, while simpler transactions would become cheaper. As an additional effect, the proposal would increase SOL's burn rate in stages — and could one day help make the token deflationary.

Cavey, a researcher at Solana infrastructure firm Temporal and the proposal's author, tells Magazine that fees currently do not 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."

SIMD-0553 would change that by tying fees more closely to the resources each transaction requests — compute units, Solana's measure of the processing work a transaction needs. Rather than going to validators, the resource fee would be burned, removing SOL from circulation, an approach that echoes Ethereum's EIP-1559 upgrade, which has burned that network's base fee rather than paying it out to validators since 2021.

Reducing validator income has not been welcomed by all, however. 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. It is currently in the support and discussion phase, which typically lasts seven epochs, or roughly two weeks, before moving to an onchain vote by validators. If approved, it would change the incentives around Solana's cheap blockspace.

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Wasting resources becomes expensive

Cavey says Solana's current fee structure creates a problem for developers. Core Solana developers have spent years making the network faster, but applications have almost no financial incentive to stop wasting resources — an inefficient transaction costs the same as an efficient one. The mismatch has been most visible during Solana's congestion episodes, such as in 2024, when a large share of transactions failed under heavy network load.

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"By installing this resource pricing right now, suddenly app developers have to optimize," Cavey says.

If the proposal is adopted, developers who reduce resource use could lower costs for end users and make their apps more attractive, while developers who consume more of Solana's computing capacity would have to pay their fair share.

The proposal is particularly aimed at computationally wasteful arbitrage, Cavey says, where searchers can submit huge numbers of transactions that mostly fail while paying very little. Over the past 30 days, five of the traders with the highest failure rates submitted 11.5 million transactions, consuming 929 million compute units across 2,477 trades that generated $16,091 in profit — while paying just 78 SOL in fees, according to his figures. A resource fee would push arbitrage searchers toward more informed and reactive strategies.

Stablecoin and token transfers could become roughly 20% cheaper, Cavey says. Temporal's modeling also finds that vote transactions would cost around 12.3% less and oracle updates 16.9% less under the proposed model.

The trade-off: some trading gets pricier

Some trading activity would become considerably more expensive. Temporal estimates that a high-priority swap routed through DFlow would cost 9.72% more under the proposed terminal fee rate, while a mid-priority OKX swap would cost 301% more and a pump.fun swap with zero priority would cost 3150% more. The priority in question refers to the optional add-on fees traders pay to improve their odds of getting a transaction into a block quickly.

Some of the network's heaviest users could therefore see their transaction costs balloon, particularly traders using bots that submit large numbers of transactions. The fee increase, though, comes off a low base. Cavey argues that even the most compute-intensive transactions would cost around $0.05 under the proposed model, compared with the $2 to $5 fees a user might pay to swap $100 on a centralized exchange.

The proposal rejects a uniform increase to Solana's existing 5,000-lamport fee — a flat 0.000005 SOL per signature regardless of how much computation a transaction uses — arguing that such a move would disproportionately hurt high-volume senders such as market makers while still failing to properly price resource usage.

Other costs to consider

"There have been a few people that have raised concerns about the parameters, but overall, everyone's been very supportive," Cavey says, citing validator income, higher costs for high-frequency users and increased complexity among the core issues.

One contributor, mschneider, asks why fees should be based on the resources a transaction requests rather than what it actually uses. "Units used seems more natural," he says.

Cavey says there is a reason the fee is based on requested resources: it lets users know the cost upfront and allows validators to check they can afford it before processing the transaction. It also means users can pay for resources they do not end up using, giving developers an incentive to estimate their needs accurately.

Validators could initially see a small reduction in base-fee revenue of around 4%. While Cavey says the parameter can be adjusted to offset that impact if needed, some contributors, such as bji, remain unconvinced and believe validator income should take precedence over the additional burn.

The proposal also raises questions about complexity, with some contributors questioning whether the new fee model could make Solana harder to use. Cavey rejects the concern, saying most users will not have to calculate fees themselves because applications and exchanges generally handle it. Automated traders are already "sophisticated" enough to adapt to changes in Solana's fee structure, he says.

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What about the SOL burn?

SIMD-0553 would increase the amount of SOL burned by transaction fees, removing more of the token from circulation rather than paying it to validators. According to the proposal, the current daily burn of around 648 SOL could rise to roughly 7,500 to 9,000 SOL at the proposed terminal fee rate — a roughly 12-to-14-fold increase if current resource demand remains unchanged.

Cavey says the higher burn could eventually push SOL into deflationary territory:

"If Solana wins, there's a chance that Solana could actually become a deflationary currency."

Burning the resource fee also reduces incentives for validators to include unnecessarily resource-intensive transactions.

Solana currently issues roughly 60,000 SOL a day, so even a 9,000-SOL daily burn would not by itself make the token deflationary — although a separate proposal, SIMD-0550, would curb inflation faster than currently scheduled. Network activity would need to grow substantially before the burn outweighed new issuance. Cavey describes that outcome as "a nice secondary effect" rather than the main objective.

"The primary goal is to align core devs, developers, and app developers to make Solana faster. That is objective number one, and that is enough of a reason for this proposal, in my opinion."

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