Proposal to Move Akash to Solana Leads Vote With 98.4% Support
Key Facts
Akash is voting on a proposal to move its protocol from the sovereign Cosmos chain akashnet-2 to the Solana network, after its core team selected Solana as the project’s next home. Proposal 346, titled "Move the Akash Protocol to Solana," opened at 15:02 UTC on October 26 and is scheduled to close at the same time on November 2. In a results snapshot at 06:30 UTC on October 27, support stood at 98.4% of votes cast, while turnout reached about 49.6% of staked AKT. The proposal requires a 33.4% quorum and a majority in favor, according to Akash’s announcement. If approved, the vote authorizes launching the token on Solana and opening the migration portal, but does not move the compute marketplace or set a date for its migration.
The plan calls for moving AKT to Solana at a 1:1 ratio as an SPL token, while retaining its ticker and six decimal places. The migration portal will be one-way and remain open for two years after the token launches, under the published terms. The plan says staked AKT must first be unstaked before it can be moved, a process that takes 21 days. The proposal estimates the token launch will take place 2 to 3 weeks after the vote is approved and after the token and portal audits are passed. The team’s announcement had given a shorter estimate of two weeks after approval, subject to passing two independent audits; the marketplace timeline is not part of that schedule.
The proposal separates the token migration from the Akash marketplace migration, with the team saying that the conversion date has not yet been determined. Moving the marketplace requires passing audits and conducting migration trials, followed by a separate governance proposal to set a conversion date. If the migration proceeds, the plan expects existing workloads to continue for 90 days after the conversion, allowing tenants to redeploy them before the old chain is shut down. Later stages include a proposal to set the conversion date, an upgrade to shut down the chain 21 days before conversion, and another upgrade to shut it down 21 days before the shutdown date. The ongoing vote therefore does not mean the marketplace migration will begin immediately, even if the token move is approved.
Akash’s team justified its choice by citing the operating burden of running an independent chain; it said about 100 validators bond AKT to secure consensus, while the core team maintains Cosmos software forks. The team estimated that running the entire marketplace on Solana would cost about 0.075 SOL a day at current activity levels. It also estimated that the Akash marketplace handles about 15,000 transactions a day, compared with 112M user transactions a day on Solana, and described the marketplace’s volume as limited relative to network activity. The move would mean giving up consensus independence, validator income and native IBC connectivity, according to the team’s rationale. These operating estimates are part of the case Akash presented for its choice, not a schedule for moving the marketplace.
The network choice followed a research process that began with a request for proposals for shared security on December 15, 2025, then expanded into a cross-chain migration program published by Overclock Labs on August 10, 2026, in 15 documents. Akash said candidates were assessed against requirements that included sustainable capacity of at least 50 marketplace transactions per second and 500 transactions per second during peak periods. Other conditions included a median transaction cost no higher than $0.01 and network uptime of 99.5% over 24 months. The team said an EVM path was among the finalists, citing developer tools and Cosmos links, while it chose Solana based on its assessment of operating requirements under stress. The announcement added that a different choice could have been made if the Alpenglow upgrade had become clearly unstable, describing that as a hypothetical condition, not a report that it was unstable.
The vote comes as Akash links compute activity to use of its token through the BME mechanism, which it said went live on mainnet on March 23, 2026, after Proposal 318 was approved. The company said in its first-quarter report that cumulative compute spending exceeded $5 million during the first 90 days of the year. These figures provide context for the choice of a new network for the token and marketplace, while the marketplace proposal remains conditional on audits, migration trials and separate governance approval. The current vote is scheduled to end on November 2 at 15:02 UTC. The estimate of a token launch 2 to 3 weeks after approval is part of the proposal’s terms, with token and portal audits required before launch.