Someone who works for a major Solana app today asked me to steel man SGP-0003. This is not my personal view, but an explanation based on my conversations on why some people are voting yes, while a number of application developers are concerned about the fee structure change.

There’s lots of good write ups on exactly what this changes but the short summary is light txs can get cheaper. Heavy ones pay more. The new resource fee is burn, not distributed as validator income.

The case for it is that Solana takes almost none of the fees generated on Solana.

If you add it all up, from chain fees, DEX fees, frontend fees etc, about 7% goes to network layer. 93% is the application layer. And most of that 7% is paid to the leader, not burned. Burn, the thing that actually hits SOL, is tiny. Issuance exceeds burn meaningfully, even at terminal 1.5%

Hyperliquid looks different. 97–99% of protocol trading fees go to the assistance fund and get bought into HYPE. Frontends and HIP-3 deployers take a cut on top, and HIP-3 can be 50/50 with the deployer, but the protocol’s share still becomes HYPE. The stack is not inverted the way Solana’s is.

How much that matters depends on your assumptions for Solana’s growth.

If you think Solana is within 2–3x of TAM, these unit economics get rough. If you think there’s 10x or 100x left, you care a lot less. Because you can make it up in volume. This has been Solana’s game to date.

ETH was very successful on value accrual but then tried “scale first, the base layer will get paid later.” And we all know how that’s turned out. L2s kept almost all of the fees. That’s the fear if demand here flattens on Solana.

The other side is obvious: people want more fully onchain compute, and this makes that more expensive. Solana is more valuable the more is onchain and compatible.

CEX and other chain fees are still much higher than Solana’s. So the question isn’t really whether the chain should be more expensive than today and in line with others, or disruptively cheap. It’s whether more of the 93% should accrue to SOL today, or if the network can grow into value by growing transactions.