@cavemanloverboy opened SIMD-0553, a proposal to make SOL actually capture the value flowing through Solana by splitting the base fee into an inclusion fee and a resource-based burn.
TLDR:
✔️Every transaction pays a flat base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature, and half of that (2,500) is burned
✔️At ~3,000 TPS that's only ~648 SOL burned per day, while inflation mints ~60,000 SOL/day → SOL stays inflationary no matter how busy the network gets
✔️Validators and market makers are the highest-volume senders and the base fee is their main cost, while retail and searchers pay priority fees that far outweigh it
The obvious fix is to raise the flat base fee for everyone, but that would hit validators and market makers hardest, damaging decentralisation and the spot market structure.
The proposal:
✔️ Split the 5,000 fee in two: a 2,500 inclusion fee per signature that still goes to the leader (unchanged), and a resource fee of 0.5 lamports per cost unit requested, burned 100%
✔️Cost units measure how heavy a tx is (compute, data loaded, write locks), so hyperefficient senders pay less than today: votes drop ~12%, oracle updates ~17%, while resource-heavy traffic pays a lot more (a zero-priority Pump swap goes 3,150%)
✔️Estimated burn lands at ~7,500 to 9,000 SOL/day, roughly 0.5% deflation against ~3.8% inflation
✔️It charges on units requested rather than used, so the fee is known before execution
With this implemented, a slice of the value Solana generates flows back to the network as burn, shared between the network, holders, and traders.