Multiply the two turnout numbers and the mandate shrinks: 67% support on 60.7% participation is about 40.7% of eligible stake actively voting to mint fewer tokens, against roughly 15.3% voting to keep the old curve [3][1][2]. Strip the abstentions and the yes share is 72.7% of votes cast [9], which is the figure a proposer quotes while 40.7% is the figure a skeptic quotes, and both are arithmetically true.
The cut averages 3.15 million SOL a year across the six-year window [3]. What the record does not carry is a SOL price, a staking yield, or a validator fee revenue line [10], so 18.9 million remains a token quantity, and anything restated as basis points of yield is the reader's own assumption wearing the vote's clothing. That gap matters, because issuance and fees are the two inputs to validator income and this vote moved only one of them.
The fee side can only be measured here in the wrong unit. July's record 4.2 billion transactions, up 13.5% on June, implies June ran near 3.70 billion [8][7], and the 91% rise since December implies December was around 2.20 billion [9][8]: call it a doubling in seven months, though that volume series still leaves the actual fees collected an open question.
Bitcoin's proposal is the cleaner puzzle, or rather the more legible one, because its trade-off arrives in a unit nobody can argue about. Blockstream's researchers compressed the hash-based scheme about 13.23 times and still landed nine times above Bitcoin's existing signatures [6], which puts the uncompressed starting point somewhere near 119 times [5]. That byte budget is being set against a coin at $78,420 and a total market of $2.64 trillion [10], so the question is how much block space a quantum hedge is worth, and the proposal at least states its price.
This is probably wrong, but the version I would defend is that Solana's validator set has voted to make its own income more fee-dependent sooner while pricing that risk at zero, because the published record offers no fee number to price it against. What would falsify it: post-vote reward data showing fee and MEV income already covering the withdrawn subsidy, in which case 18.9 million SOL was a cost the network had outgrown rather than a haircut its operators will feel. On the Bitcoin side the falsifier is cheaper still, since a smaller post-quantum scheme arriving before activation would leave the August 27 filing as the proposal that set the metric rather than the one that ships [5][7].
