SOL price rallied 5% today, but on-chain data raises doubts about whether Solana can overcome the barrier at $190.
Solana's native token, SOL (SOL), experienced a 5% increase on May 27, trading up from $161 on May 26 to $171. This rise fueled investors' hopes for continued growth, especially since SOL had reached $188.90 on May 21, just days earlier. A significant factor in SOL’s upward movement is a proposal designed to increase yields for validators rather than burning tokens, though network activity remains unchanged.
On May 27, Solana's validators approved the SIMD-0096 proposal, which eliminates the 50% burn rate on priority transactions and sets it to 0%. Consequently, from epoch 621 onward, all transaction fees will be allocated to block producers. This shift aims to ensure validators are motivated to prioritize network security and efficiency over engaging in arbitrage strategies that involve transaction reordering or exclusion.
Maximal extractable value (MEV) refers to profits block producers make by determining the order of transaction processing on the blockchain. With each block containing a limited number of transactions, validators can choose which pending transactions to include, often to the detriment of regular users who might face poorer execution prices in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.