Helius researcher releases proposal recommending increasing Solana's negative inflation rate from -15% to -30%

Foresight News reports that a Helius researcher has released a proposed proposal, SIMD-550, suggesting an update to Solana's inflation schedule by increasing the disinflation rate from -15% to -30%, effectively doubling the pace at which inflation decreases. This would enable inflation to reach the long-term terminal rate of 1.5% in 2.8 years (by the first half of 2029), instead of 5.7 years (first half of 2032). According to their model, this proposal would reduce SOL issuance by 18.89 million over six years, valued at approximately $1.51 billion, while incrementally reducing the nominal staking yield over the first three years from about 5.84% to around 4.34%, 3.00%, and 2.25%. It is expected that doubling disinflation will have limited impact on the number of profitable validators, with 2 validators shifting from profitable or breakeven to loss in the first year, 13 in the second year, and 30 in the third year.

SIMD-550 updates SIMD-411 (November 2025), which was halted due to the ecosystem awaiting new tools. SIMD-550 can be viewed as part of a broader effort to improve Solana tokenomics. Other components include SIMD-553, which proposes adding a burn mechanism for resource fees, as well as Alpenglow's Validator Admission Ticket (VAT).