Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has floated a plan to expand the network's SOL supply to buy a company, then use that company's revenue to buy back and burn SOL. In an Aug. 15 post, he called the concept more bullish than simply lowering inflation. The next day he clarified that company revenue would fund the purchases and burns, returning value to holders.
How the idea would work
Yakovenko's proposal is straightforward on paper: issue incremental SOL tokens, use them to acquire a business, and let the acquired firm's cash flow buy SOL off the market and destroy it. That would shrink supply over time, he argued, while a plain inflation cut only slows new issuance. The distinction matters because Solana's current inflation runs about 60,000 SOL per day, according to a draft fee-burn proposal known as SIMD-0553. That same document estimates the network burns only about 648 SOL daily from signature fees at roughly 3,000 transactions per second.
But the idea is far from a formal plan. As of Aug. 18, no acquisition-related Solana Governance Proposal or SIMD exists in the official merged-proposal directories. Yakovenko's posts are just that — posts.
Governance roadblocks
Solana's governance framework doesn't make this easy. A validator vote account with at least 100,000 SOL staked can submit a Solana Governance Proposal. Support from 15% of active stake opens voting, and approval requires two-thirds of decisive stake. Individual delegators can override their validator's vote, so even a validator-backed proposal isn't a done deal.
If a protocol change were approved, it would still need one or more technical proposals, client implementation, and activation under the SIMD process. That's a long road, and none of that has started.
Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz responded sarcastically that validators would have to agree on running a company. His point cuts to a core problem: a stake-weighted mandate doesn't identify a legal buyer. The cited governance materials don't specify who could sign a purchase agreement, hold the asset, appoint management, or direct revenue.
Who actually buys and owns?
The Solana Foundation is a Zug-based nonprofit, and Solana Labs is a separate company group. Neither is named as the buyer in Yakovenko's posts, and validators and delegators are separate network participants. The materials don't grant any of them acquisition authority for the network.
If newly issued SOL were transferred to a seller, total supply would rise at issuance. A holder receiving none would hold a smaller share unless later burns reduced it. That's a dilution risk that the buyback-and-burn mechanism would need to overcome — and it only works if the acquired company actually generates revenue.
What's missing
SIMD-0553, the draft fee-burn proposal, contains no acquisition mechanism and doesn't authorize Yakovenko's idea. It's a separate track entirely. Until a formal proposal defines both tracks, control remains unresolved: validators and delegators could signal a direction, the SIMD process would still require technical specification, implementation and activation, and the corporate side would need to identify who selects the target, which legal entity buys and owns it, and who controls operations and revenue.
Yakovenko hasn't filed anything yet. The next concrete step is a formal proposal — either a governance proposal or a SIMD draft — that spells out the acquisition mechanics. Without that, the idea stays a thought experiment.
