Overview

Solana validators allow SOL holders to earn staking rewards with 5-7% APY through token inflation. Holders can participate in this process by locking SOL tokens on a Solana validator in a non-custodial manner.

Staking or de-staking involves a wait period of around 2 days. Actively staked SOL is locked and cannot be transferred. However, the wallet owner can choose to initiate the de-staking process at any time.

Validators are rewarded for driving the blockchain network. The majority of the reward goes back to the staker but the staking operator keeps a percentage of the rewards as commission.

Validators are expensive to acquire and host because they require high-end datacenter-grade hardware and have large networking demands. They are also time-intensive to maintain, requiring participation in a public forum and 24/7 on-call coverage with < 30-minute incident response and < 12h hours of notice for routine upgrades.

The Solana validator community relentlessly scrutinizes the performance of top validators additionally.

Services

Public-Branded Validator

Blockdaemon runs a public-branded validator. Any user can stake their SOL on Blockdaemon’s validator to earn staking rewards.

Our validator is one of the largest validators (by stake) in the Solana network. Currently, it has ~6.5 million SOL staked, which amounts to 1.6% of the total stake in the Solana network.

Blockdaemon leads by example by monitoring the validator’s performance indicators closely and taking steps to optimize it to be among the best performing.

Lido-Validator

Blockdaemon participates in the Lido for Solana liquid staking pool by running one validator.

Users cannot directly stake on Blockdaemon’s Lido validator. Staking is done via a public app, which distributes stake among the Blockdaemon validator and lots of others. Liquid Solana Staking | Lido

Stakers receive stSOL tokens proportional to their locked-up stake, which can be moved at any time as a replacement to the locked stake (liquid staking).