Solana price prediction: 22.88 million new SOL a year against $1.56 billion in the ETFs: what you can do now

The Solana blockchain pays out around 22.88 million new SOL a year. At $100.91 per token that is a good $2.31 billion of new supply, and it arises whether or not anybody buys. On the other side stand all the American Solana funds together, with cumulative net inflows of $1.56 billion since they launched. In twelve months the blockchain therefore delivers one and a half times what the ETFs have gathered in their entire history.

That calculation is the frame around every Solana forecast. Where the price can point over a horizon of months is set out in our Solana price prediction. The figures for this article come from our own query of the Solana mainnet nodes on Sunday evening, October 18, and they can be recalculated.

The emission in numbers: 62,677 new SOL every day

A query of the getInflationRate method at a mainnet node returns an inflation rate of 3.5969 percent for the current epoch, 1061. The getSupply method gives a total supply of 636,028,735 SOL, of which 589,437,970 SOL are in circulation and 46,590,765 SOL sit in non-circulating accounts. The inflation rate applies to the total supply, not to the float.

From that follows an annual emission of 22,877,199 SOL. Spread over 365 days that is 62,677 new SOL a day, or $6.32 million daily at Sunday evening's price. Measured against the market value of $59.47 billion, the annual emission amounts to 3.88 percent.

For comparison, the demand side as far as it can be quantified: according to figures compiled at 24/7 Wall St. on October 18, the American Solana spot ETFs carry cumulative net inflows of $1.56 billion. Their net assets stood at $1.62 billion on October 16, down from $1.96 billion on September 25. That is a decline of 17.6 percent in three weeks.

How Solana's inflation formula works

Solana has no fixed cap on the token supply the way Bitcoin does. Instead a fixed schedule runs: the emission started in 2021 at 8 percent a year and has since fallen annually by 15 percent of its own value, until it reaches a terminal rate of 1.5 percent. That mechanism is called disinflation. It is set out in the inflation schedule in the Solana documentation and has been unchanged since launch.

Disinflation means the quantity of new tokens keeps growing, only more slowly. At today's 3.5969 percent it will take until roughly 2032 under the current schedule for the 1.5 percent to be reached. Over that period the schedule produces more than 100 million further SOL.

The new tokens go entirely to the validators and to the depositors who stake with them. The foundation field of the query reads 0.0, so the foundation no longer receives a share. For holders who do not stake their SOL, that amounts to a quiet dilution at the full emission rate.

$1.56 billion across all ETFs, $449 million of it from the issuers

The cumulative inflows are not a pure measure of demand. An analysis of the launch phase identifies around $449.3 million as seed capital from the issuers themselves, that is money the fund providers put into their own products at launch so that the products are tradable. Subtract that and around $1.11 billion remains that came from investors.

Measured against that amount, the blockchain delivers 2.08 times as much in a single year. The funds would therefore have to more than double their investor demand to date just to absorb one year of emission.

Since October 5 the funds have recorded outflows in every trading session, $54.9 million in total through October 16. The largest single day was October 16 at $12.7 million. The last day of inflows was October 2.

The price on Sunday evening: $100.91, just above the daily low

SOL traded at $100.91 on Sunday evening, 3.03 percent below its level 24 hours earlier. The daily high was $104.60 and the daily low $100.49. The record of $293.31 is 65.6 percent away from the price.

The round $100 level is therefore within reach for the third time this week. In our Solana forecast of October 17 it was named, at a price of $103, as the level that decides; the price has given up 2.1 percent since then and the daily low was 42 cents above the level. It has held so far, but the distance has grown smaller.

What else has changed since October 17: the stablecoin supply on the Solana blockchain stood at $15.5 billion according to DeFiLlama figures from October 17, down from $17.45 billion at the September 25 high. That base is the fuel for trading on the blockchain, and it continues to shrink.

SIMD-0550 would double the disinflation

The SIMD-0550 proposal takes aim at exactly this emission. SIMD stands for Solana Improvement Document and is the procedure through which changes to the protocol are proposed and voted on. SIMD-0550 was submitted in early June 2026 by a developer at the infrastructure provider Helius who goes by the name lostintime101; Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has publicly backed the proposal. The discussion is running on the Solana Forum.

The core of it: the annual disinflation rate would be doubled from 15 to 30 percent. The terminal rate of 1.5 percent stays unchanged, it would simply be reached considerably earlier. According to the applicants' model, the path there shortens from about 5.7 years to 2.8. On the same calculation that removes around $1.5 billion of future emission at today's prices.

The price for it is stated in the submission itself: a model shown on the foundation's conference call in June estimates that around 30 validators would tip from profitable or break-even to unprofitable in the second or third year. Anyone running a small validator may therefore lose their basis.

Two failed attempts lie behind the proposal

SIMD-0550 is the third attempt. SIMD-0228 came to a vote in March 2025 and fell short with 61.4 percent approval; two thirds are required, that is 66.67 percent. SIMD-0411, also from Helius developers and submitted in November 2025, would have achieved the same goal and was withdrawn, according to the analysis by Chainflow, while the tooling for the vote was still missing.

Voting goes by stake weight. That means the validators with the most delegated SOL decide, and they decide on their own revenue. A proposal that cuts the emission also cuts the earnings of those voting. The failure of two attempts therefore has an obvious explanation, and it is the reason a third attempt is no formality. No date has been set for the vote on SIMD-0550.

5.23 percent nominal yield on 437 million SOL staked

The getVoteAccounts query at a mainnet node shows 668 active validators and 12 delinquent ones. Together they carry 437,350,803 SOL of activated stake. That is 74.20 percent of the float and 68.76 percent of the total supply.

Those three numbers give the nominal staking yield: the emission of 22,877,199 SOL is spread across 437,350,803 staked SOL, which is 5.23 percent a year before commission and before tax. That figure is nominal, not real. Anyone staking receives 5.23 percent more tokens and afterwards holds roughly the same share of the network as before. Anyone not staking loses share.

If SIMD-0550 passes, that yield falls correspondingly faster. With doubled disinflation it would be at around 2.2 percent within a few years, calculated with today's staking rate. Which providers in the German market offer staking and on what terms is shown in our comparison of staking platforms.

668 validators, 65 of them on full commission

The commission is the share of staking earnings the validator keeps for itself. The value is public in every validator's vote account and can be read out with the same query that returns the stake distribution.

The median commission among the 668 active validators is 5 percent. 65 of them, close to one in ten, take 100 percent: anyone delegating there receives nothing of the 5.23 percent. This is not fraud and sits openly in the data, but nobody sees it in the interfaces of many wallets, because the commission is not displayed there.

A second value from the same query: the five largest validators together hold 15.11 percent of the stake, and 18 validators are enough to make up one third of it. This Nakamoto coefficient of 18 is the number that counts when the question is how distributed the vote on SIMD-0550 actually is.

The tax on staking earnings and the holding period

For investors in Germany the position is this: on the tax authorities' line, staking earnings are other income and are taxable in the year they are received at the personal income tax rate, once the €256 annual threshold is exceeded. The market value at the moment of receipt is the value the tax office applies. At a nominal yield of 5.23 percent that threshold is already reached on a holding of around $5,700.

Separate from that stands the one-year holding period on the disposal gain on the SOL themselves. Where the announced reform of that period stands is something we track continuously on our page on the status of the crypto holding period reform. For documenting individual receipts with date and market value a tax tool makes sense, because the receipts arrive daily.

This paragraph is no substitute for tax advice. The treatment of staking earnings is in parts not yet conclusively settled, and it depends on your personal situation.

Our assessment of the emission

In the view of this desk, the emission is the underrated part of every Solana forecast. The evidence: $2.31 billion of new supply a year against $1.11 billion of investor money in all the ETFs across their entire life, plus outflows in every session since October 5 and a stablecoin base that has shrunk by $1.95 billion since September 25. As long as that is the position, a price rise needs demand from somewhere else, not from the funds.

What argues against it: the emission has been known and priced in since 2021, it is not news. Three quarters of the new tokens land with depositors who staked their tokens and therefore tend to hold rather than sell, and the staking rate of 74.20 percent is high. And the consensus switch to Alpenglow on October 21 lowers validators' costs, which could keep smaller operators viable even at a lower emission. This is an assessment of the situation, not a recommendation to buy or sell.

Solana emission: without SIMD-0550 it stays 22.9 million SOL a year

Three steps that can be dealt with today:

1. Check your validator's commission. If it is 100 percent, you receive nothing of the 5.23 percent. The commission sits in the vote account and is not displayed in many wallets. Anyone staking through a provider will find the terms in the comparison of staking platforms.
2. Record receipts with date and market value. Income tax applies from €256 of staking earnings a year, and what counts is the value on the day of receipt. The appropriate tools are listed in the comparison of tax tools.
3. Weigh the fees when buying more. At an annual emission of 3.88 percent of market value, a purchase fee of one percent carries noticeable weight. The terms at the trading venues are set out in the exchange comparison.

(As of October 18, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)