On a quiet Tuesday, Solana’s validator set voted through SIMD-0096 with 94% approval. The change is deceptively simple: 100% of priority fees now go directly to the block producer. No more sharing with the pool. No more burn. Just pure, unfiltered reward for the one who wins the slot. To the casual observer, this is a routine economic optimization. To me, after decades in the flame of decentralization, it feels like a seismic reallocation of power—one that could reshape Solana from a trust-minimized network into a well-greased oligarchy.
Context matters here. Priority fees are the grease that users pay to jump the line when the network is congested. They are a direct signal of demand, a tax on speed. Before SIMD-0096, those fees were split among the entire validator set or partially burned—a mechanism that smoothed income across the network and muted the incentive for extractive behavior. The new model throws that egalitarianism out the window. The block producer—the validator lucky enough to be selected in that slot—keeps every last lamport. It is a winner-take-all lottery, and the house strongly favors those who already have the best hardware, the most stake, and the most sophisticated MEV pipelines.
Chasing the frontier where code meets belief. My first lesson in the gap between ideology and reality came in 2017, when I spent two months auditing early ERC-20 contracts in a dingy Austin hackathon. I found a gas optimization flaw that would have cost projects millions—a tiny oversight born from the hype that blinded builders to the nuance of incentives. This proposal is another such blind spot, masked as progress. It does not touch the technology stack; it does not increase TPS or reduce latency. It merely rewrites the distribution of value. And in doing so, it quietly changes the soul of the network.
The core insight is this: priority fees are the primary reward for MEV extraction. When a searcher sandwiches a user’s trade or front-runs a liquidation, the profit is ultimately paid through priority fees to the block producer. By giving 100% of that to the producer, Solana is effectively saying, “We don’t just tolerate MEV—we celebrate it.” This is a radical departure from Ethereum’s EIP-1559, which burns a portion of fees to benefit all holders and dampens the incentive for congestion-based profit. Solana’s choice is not a technical one; it is a values-based decision that prioritizes validator profitability over user fairness and network resilience.
Curiosity is the only leverage in DeFi Summer. During the 2022 bear market, when the hype had faded and the depression was real, I dove into Celestia’s modular architecture. I spent six months mapping out how separating execution from consensus could prevent the congestion that killed so many NFT projects. That deep dive taught me that incentive alignment is the hardest problem in crypto. This proposal aligns validators—sure—but it does so by increasing the variance of their income. The small validator with a home server will now earn far less in peak hours compared to the mega-validator with a private mempool and a fleet of AWS instances. Over time, the capital-rich will accumulate more stake, win more slots, and capture an ever-larger share of fees. The rich get richer, and the network gets more centralized.
The contrarian angle: many will celebrate this as a pro-growth move. Better validator incentives attract more stake, reduce the need for inflationary rewards, and potentially lower the overall cost of security. Some analysts will point to rising transaction volumes and claim the network has become more efficient. But I see a different story. This vote was carried by the very validators who stand to gain the most—a textbook case of governance capture. The same entities that voted for the change are the ones that will extract the most value. Small delegators and retail users had no real say; their stake is too diffuse to oppose a coalition of large players. In the name of “optimization,” the protocol has handed its own steering wheel to a select few.
Art is the glitch that proves we are human. In 2021, I co-founded Code & Canvas, a project that merged smart contract transparency with feminist art history. We raised 150 ETH and faced constant dismissal from collectors who thought “niche” was a synonym for “irrelevant.” That experience hardened my belief that decentralization must serve the many, not just the powerful. SIMD-0096 feels like the opposite: a move that serves the large at the expense of the weak. The market may not care. SOL price might even rally on the narrative of “enhanced validator economics.” But the real price will be paid in the slow erosion of trust. Every front-run trade, every failed transaction due to MEV, every new validator that gives up because the barrier is too high—these are the hidden costs.
So where does that leave us? I am an evangelist because I believe in the potential of code to emancipate, not to entrench. This proposal does not change my belief in Solana's technology—it's still fast, it's still elegant. But it changes my belief in its governance. The protocol is cold; the evangelist is warm. We need to watch the next three months like hawks. Measure the Gini coefficient of validator revenue. Track the percentage of priority fees captured by the top ten validators. If the concentration exceeds 30%, we will have our answer.
In the silence of the chain, we hear the future. It whispers that this might be the moment Solana chose efficiency over equity. The question is whether a network built for speed can also be a home for fairness. I remain curious, skeptical, and hopeful—because that is the only way to survive in this frontier.