Company: FWDI
Filing Date: 2025-11-10
Form Type: 424B5
Source: 0001683168-25-008141
Chunk: 9

Company: Forward Industries, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-11-10
Form: 424B5
Chunk 9
---
%, and will fall
15% every epoch-year until they reach a long-term floor of 1.5%. Unlock schedules applicable to these allocations may periodically increase
circulating supply, creating potential selling pressure and adversely affecting the price of SOL. Historically, 50% of all transaction
fees were burned (with the other 50% going to the validator), but now all transaction fees go to the validator after the passage and adoption
of the Solana Improvement Document 96.

SOL is used as part of Solana’s
proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. In general, proof-of-stake blockchains have block producers called validators that run nodes, bond
or stake the protocol’s native token, propose blocks when chosen to do so and validate/sign the transactions and blocks of others
when not. Validators are chosen to produce a block in proportion to their stake, which makes it extremely costly for bad actors to attempt
to control the network and add invalid transactions to the blockchain. Validators receive staking rewards for the work they perform, which
further incentivizes validators to behave properly, as they would otherwise miss out on such rewards. Other proof-of-stake networks often
“slash” some or all of a validator’s stake if it intentionally or unintentionally performs its duties poorly, for example,
by double-signing a transaction, though Solana has not implemented slashing at this time. In addition to its use within consensus, SOL
is also a “gas token,” meaning that users of the Solana blockchain pay SOL to validators (and delegators) as compensation
for processing their transactions.

We see three particularly
notable items giving Solana a technical advantage compared to many smart contract blockchain peers. Solana’s proof-of-history gives
validators a notion of time and allows them to produce blocks without requiring the network to first agree upon the current block, resulting
in speed advantages. Further, unlike peer blockchains that often use single-threaded virtual machines, Solana enables parallel transaction
execution to increase throughput and take advantage of future hardware improvements resulting from increased CPU core counts. In addition,
Solana is optimized for speed and security, and is naturally growing into decentralization as hardware and bandwidth costs fall over time,
positioning it well along the Blockchain Trilemma.

While Solana Labs and the
Solana Foundation have played important roles in the development of the Solana ecosystem, no single entity owns or controls the Solana
network. However, concentration of influence in these entities, particularly in early-stage protocol