Pinned Tweet
Permissionless capital markets
Censorship-resistant capital markets
Decentralised capital markets
This is why I'm here
Censorship-resistant capital markets
Decentralised capital markets
This is why I'm here
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
One of the largest rate of change indicators I see in this industry is the general levels of what’s “popular” and inversely what’s seen as fringe or “weird”
In the earlier days, (even just two cycles ago) the fringe was popular, people who were outcast, going against the grain, breaking new ground were seen as pioneers.
These days, KOLs and random traders get all the hype and attention, and the ethos of what this industry was founded on is slowly forgotten.
Not by all, but by many.
The new blood sees memecoins, KOLs and lambos, instead of the system underlying it all, and the purpose in which it was created.
Bring back the fringe, bring back the cypher punk edge that made all of this what it is.
In the earlier days, (even just two cycles ago) the fringe was popular, people who were outcast, going against the grain, breaking new ground were seen as pioneers.
These days, KOLs and random traders get all the hype and attention, and the ethos of what this industry was founded on is slowly forgotten.
Not by all, but by many.
The new blood sees memecoins, KOLs and lambos, instead of the system underlying it all, and the purpose in which it was created.
Bring back the fringe, bring back the cypher punk edge that made all of this what it is.
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There's more than one way to make a validator set permissioned
Deciding who can and can't afford to operate a validator is one way
Deciding who can and can't afford to operate a validator is one way
I paid $500/month for 6 months to test Alpenglow.
A few weeks after it shipped, the Foundation cut my SFDP stake.
And I absolutely agree with the move.
Directionally.
Some context: I turned off @gotokamai validator 2 days ago.
Yesterday I put my 2-year validator P&L out. Tolyby 50%.
@TheWattenhofer (who co-wrote Alpenglow) said it's worth considering now that the delegation program is changing.
So I wrote the SIMD.
SFDP was a subsidy. When the new rules dropped on Nov 6, 337 validators were in it. Roughly half the network, kept alive by ~5% of staked SOL.
Ending that is healthy. But once it's gone, 1 number decides who can afford to run a validator: the VAT. 0.8 SOL a day, flat, burned, whether you hold 5k SOL or 5M.
Roger's framing: the VAT is there to protect against "too many" validators.
Alpenglow already caps the active set at the 2,000 highest staked. We're at 698. That's 1,300 empty seats before "too many" is a problem.
On my own books:
↳ old vote fees: 2 years net 329 SOL, year 2 at −0.7
↳ VAT at 0.8: net 487, year 2 around +118
↳ VAT at 0.4: net ~830, year 2 around +275
Cost to the network: ~102k SOL a year less burned. About 0.45% of annual issuance.
That's the price of keeping the operators who test upgrades and spread stake away from the big hosting providers.
The ask: VAT × 0.5 at every slot-time stage. Same burn, same cap, same stake ordering. 1 constant table behind a feature gate.
Operators: reply with your numbers (stake, monthly costs, what share VAT eats). Or drop them straight in the SIMD discussion below.
The more real P&Ls in it, the harder it is to ignore.
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
We’re a founding member of Layer 33 and we stand behind this response.
The question at the centre of it: why does the new SFDP value a brand-new validator over one that has run reliably for years?
We’re not asking @SolanaFndn to reverse course, just to sequence it properly.
The question at the centre of it: why does the new SFDP value a brand-new validator over one that has run reliably for years?
We’re not asking @SolanaFndn to reverse course, just to sequence it properly.
Response to the Foundation on SFDP changes
We appreciate the Foundation responding publicly. Conversations at Breakpoint and Block Zero are valuable, but public discourse lets operators who cannot attend those events be heard too. And there is real agreement in the response, so let's start there.
The response says Solana is much larger than when SFDP started, that the validator set has matured, and that the network faces challenges nobody conceived of at the beginning. We agree. We said the same thing in our letter. Solana is entering its next stage, and delegation should evolve with it.
Where we part ways is what that evolution looks like. If the network has matured, the goalposts should move. Instead, SFDP is being redefined to complete its original goal again. That is not the next stage. It is the first stage on a loop, except the new rules boot the long-term contributors who are the output of the first stage and replace them with short-term 12 month tenants. The network trades operators who stayed for years for operators who are built to leave. It regressed, not progressed.
Supporting new validators and supporting existing contributors are not mutually exclusive. A mature program does both. These rules prioritize only one group, and it is not the existing talent.
First Principles
The question is simple: Why does the new program value a brand new validator over one that has been operating reliably for three or more years?
New validators will continue to receive stake. Validators who have run through every upgrade, every outage, and every cluster test since 2023 will lose it. We have read the announcement and the response several times and cannot construct the argument that makes the first group more valuable to network health than the second. If that argument exists, we would like to hear it.
Alpenglow Community Cluster
In follow-up comments, the Foundation said the Alpenglow community cluster participants provided crucial help, that they should be directly rewarded, and that these changes exist in part to make that possible. We welcome that. It is the first time the Foundation has said it.
But it raises more questions than it answers.
First, none of this was communicated with the initial announcement. The announcement said: you are out, the offboarding tranches start now. Only after independent validators pushed back publicly did the Foundation say contributors would be rewarded. And when asked how, the answer was opaque. Operators who ran the cluster at their own expense did not know until this week that they were about to lose their delegation, and still do not know whether they will get any of it back.
Second, the Foundation says that with so much stake tied up in SFDP there was no way to reward the cluster participants. That is hard to accept. SFDP currently holds over 10 million SOL in residual. Rewarding a group of cluster participants materially would not have required dismantling the program as we know it.
Third, the people the Foundation now says it wants to reward are the people being retired first. If the intent is to reward them, the sequence should be reward first, then restructure. Not retire, then promise.
So if participating in the cluster is seen as valuable, will they be rewarded? Why does the retirement proceed before that is defined?
"We reward contributors" is still not a program
One of the responses says the intent is not to make running a validator a secondary activity, but to directly reward those improving network health. We agree with that framing entirely. It is close to word for word what our letter proposed. The response also says validators who contribute to network health should be rewarded, and points to past discretionary delegations to Blueshift and early Frankendancer operators as proof. We agree those were good decisions and believe discretionary delegations should continue to exist. But a handful of discretionary delegations is not a system.
In addition, intent is not process. There are still no criteria, no application, and no timeline. Most contributors did not know discretionary delegation existed until this response. Now that they do, they have no idea how to access it or whether they qualify. "We staked to these guys before" is not an answer to "how do I survive on solana." Meanwhile contributors are shutting down nodes and cancelling Breakpoint trips because the only concrete thing they have been told is that their stake is leaving.
This is not an argument against discretionary delegation. It is an argument for giving contributors something concrete to grasp to. Objective criteria show talented operators what the network values and can grow the contributor count. Discretionary delegation catches what the criteria miss. Both together work. Discretion alone asks everyone to trust a process they cannot see.
On the feedback
Asked to publish the feedback behind these changes, the Foundation pointed to a Discord channel where SFDP validators call out malicious or harmful operators.
We know the channel. The people in it do real work. But that is not feedback on program design. It is validators reporting bad actors, and if the problem was bad actors, the obvious response was to bring those validators in and use their tools to remove the bad actors directly. Instead these changes aimed to retire the people doing the reporting along with the people they were reporting. There is a real chance good actors are now shut down for having spent their time calling out bad ones to improve the network.
The changes themselves
The response says SFDP was not reactive enough. On that, fair. The 1M SOL cap was badly outdated. But these changes do not trim fat. They cut into bone.
The delegation cut: The validators who survive the retirement see their SFDP delegation drop from roughly 85k SOL to 55k. A 30k- 35k SOL cut is a severe hit for any independent validator, from any source. For many it is the difference between profitable and not.
The twelve-month retirement: An automatic clock tells every operator in the program that they are a tenant with an eviction date. That is not how you retain the people you want. An annual review that renews contributors and removes the inactive would achieve the same accountability without the eviction notice.
The 100-validator cap: If more than 100 operators meet the criteria, why turn them away? If fewer do, the cap is irrelevant. Either way it serves no purpose except to signal scarcity. Was any analysis done to arrive at 100? If so, can it be published? If the other changes are implemented, the program likely lands near that number on its own without needing to announce a ceiling.
The timing: Breakpoint and Block Zero are days away. Independent validators who booked travel to attend are now being told they are no longer viable. Some even sponsored events. Some have cancelled their tickets. Some have already turned their validators off. Block Zero in particular is organized, hosted, attended, and sponsored by many of the validators now on the chopping block. At least one sponsor has said publicly that they would have reconsidered their sponsorship had they known they would be losing SFDP stake. These are exactly the people the network should be fighting to keep, and the Foundation chose the week before its own conference to tell them to leave.
The communication problem underneath all of it
Step back and look at the sequence. The announcement said: you are out, tranches start now. Nothing about rewarding contributors. Nothing about Alpenglow. Nothing about where the stake goes. After the community pushed back, the Foundation said contributors would be rewarded but could not say how.
If the plan all along was to support contributors, that should have been the headline, with criteria attached. Instead the people affected have learned about their own future one X reply at a time days later. That is the part that has done the most damage, and it is the easiest to fix.
In conclusion
We are not asking the Foundation to reverse course. We are asking it to sequence this correctly. Our asks, updated from the original letter:
◆ Pause the weekly retirement tranches until communications around not throwing contributors aside is improved.
◆ The Foundation has now said Alpenglow community cluster participants should be rewarded. Additional details on this would be great because as it stands, these people are going to not be profitable soon.
◆ Publish the analysis behind the 300k, 100-validator, twelve-month, and 55k figures.
◆ Publish the impact assessment on the current validator set, including how roughly 75% of members came to be deemed non-contributing.
◆ Open a formal consultation with current SFDP members, with a stated process and timeline.
◆ Publish objective criteria and an application process for contribution-based delegation, to run alongside discretionary delegation.
◆ Answer the first-principles question: Why does the SFDP strictly value a new validator over a contributor who has honestly operated for years to improve the Solana network?
The Foundation says these changes are about getting to what comes next. We agree that is the goal. What should not come next is booting Solana's contributors to the curb.
L33
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
Response to the Foundation on SFDP changes
We appreciate the Foundation responding publicly. Conversations at Breakpoint and Block Zero are valuable, but public discourse lets operators who cannot attend those events be heard too. And there is real agreement in the response, so let's start there.
The response says Solana is much larger than when SFDP started, that the validator set has matured, and that the network faces challenges nobody conceived of at the beginning. We agree. We said the same thing in our letter. Solana is entering its next stage, and delegation should evolve with it.
Where we part ways is what that evolution looks like. If the network has matured, the goalposts should move. Instead, SFDP is being redefined to complete its original goal again. That is not the next stage. It is the first stage on a loop, except the new rules boot the long-term contributors who are the output of the first stage and replace them with short-term 12 month tenants. The network trades operators who stayed for years for operators who are built to leave. It regressed, not progressed.
Supporting new validators and supporting existing contributors are not mutually exclusive. A mature program does both. These rules prioritize only one group, and it is not the existing talent.
First Principles
The question is simple: Why does the new program value a brand new validator over one that has been operating reliably for three or more years?
New validators will continue to receive stake. Validators who have run through every upgrade, every outage, and every cluster test since 2023 will lose it. We have read the announcement and the response several times and cannot construct the argument that makes the first group more valuable to network health than the second. If that argument exists, we would like to hear it.
Alpenglow Community Cluster
In follow-up comments, the Foundation said the Alpenglow community cluster participants provided crucial help, that they should be directly rewarded, and that these changes exist in part to make that possible. We welcome that. It is the first time the Foundation has said it.
But it raises more questions than it answers.
First, none of this was communicated with the initial announcement. The announcement said: you are out, the offboarding tranches start now. Only after independent validators pushed back publicly did the Foundation say contributors would be rewarded. And when asked how, the answer was opaque. Operators who ran the cluster at their own expense did not know until this week that they were about to lose their delegation, and still do not know whether they will get any of it back.
Second, the Foundation says that with so much stake tied up in SFDP there was no way to reward the cluster participants. That is hard to accept. SFDP currently holds over 10 million SOL in residual. Rewarding a group of cluster participants materially would not have required dismantling the program as we know it.
Third, the people the Foundation now says it wants to reward are the people being retired first. If the intent is to reward them, the sequence should be reward first, then restructure. Not retire, then promise.
So if participating in the cluster is seen as valuable, will they be rewarded? Why does the retirement proceed before that is defined?
"We reward contributors" is still not a program
One of the responses says the intent is not to make running a validator a secondary activity, but to directly reward those improving network health. We agree with that framing entirely. It is close to word for word what our letter proposed. The response also says validators who contribute to network health should be rewarded, and points to past discretionary delegations to Blueshift and early Frankendancer operators as proof. We agree those were good decisions and believe discretionary delegations should continue to exist. But a handful of discretionary delegations is not a system.
In addition, intent is not process. There are still no criteria, no application, and no timeline. Most contributors did not know discretionary delegation existed until this response. Now that they do, they have no idea how to access it or whether they qualify. "We staked to these guys before" is not an answer to "how do I survive on solana." Meanwhile contributors are shutting down nodes and cancelling Breakpoint trips because the only concrete thing they have been told is that their stake is leaving.
This is not an argument against discretionary delegation. It is an argument for giving contributors something concrete to grasp to. Objective criteria show talented operators what the network values and can grow the contributor count. Discretionary delegation catches what the criteria miss. Both together work. Discretion alone asks everyone to trust a process they cannot see.
On the feedback
Asked to publish the feedback behind these changes, the Foundation pointed to a Discord channel where SFDP validators call out malicious or harmful operators.
We know the channel. The people in it do real work. But that is not feedback on program design. It is validators reporting bad actors, and if the problem was bad actors, the obvious response was to bring those validators in and use their tools to remove the bad actors directly. Instead these changes aimed to retire the people doing the reporting along with the people they were reporting. There is a real chance good actors are now shut down for having spent their time calling out bad ones to improve the network.
The changes themselves
The response says SFDP was not reactive enough. On that, fair. The 1M SOL cap was badly outdated. But these changes do not trim fat. They cut into bone.
The delegation cut: The validators who survive the retirement see their SFDP delegation drop from roughly 85k SOL to 55k. A 30k- 35k SOL cut is a severe hit for any independent validator, from any source. For many it is the difference between profitable and not.
The twelve-month retirement: An automatic clock tells every operator in the program that they are a tenant with an eviction date. That is not how you retain the people you want. An annual review that renews contributors and removes the inactive would achieve the same accountability without the eviction notice.
The 100-validator cap: If more than 100 operators meet the criteria, why turn them away? If fewer do, the cap is irrelevant. Either way it serves no purpose except to signal scarcity. Was any analysis done to arrive at 100? If so, can it be published? If the other changes are implemented, the program likely lands near that number on its own without needing to announce a ceiling.
The timing: Breakpoint and Block Zero are days away. Independent validators who booked travel to attend are now being told they are no longer viable. Some even sponsored events. Some have cancelled their tickets. Some have already turned their validators off. Block Zero in particular is organized, hosted, attended, and sponsored by many of the validators now on the chopping block. At least one sponsor has said publicly that they would have reconsidered their sponsorship had they known they would be losing SFDP stake. These are exactly the people the network should be fighting to keep, and the Foundation chose the week before its own conference to tell them to leave.
The communication problem underneath all of it
Step back and look at the sequence. The announcement said: you are out, tranches start now. Nothing about rewarding contributors. Nothing about Alpenglow. Nothing about where the stake goes. After the community pushed back, the Foundation said contributors would be rewarded but could not say how.
If the plan all along was to support contributors, that should have been the headline, with criteria attached. Instead the people affected have learned about their own future one X reply at a time days later. That is the part that has done the most damage, and it is the easiest to fix.
In conclusion
We are not asking the Foundation to reverse course. We are asking it to sequence this correctly. Our asks, updated from the original letter:
◆ Pause the weekly retirement tranches until communications around not throwing contributors aside is improved.
◆ The Foundation has now said Alpenglow community cluster participants should be rewarded. Additional details on this would be great because as it stands, these people are going to not be profitable soon.
◆ Publish the analysis behind the 300k, 100-validator, twelve-month, and 55k figures.
◆ Publish the impact assessment on the current validator set, including how roughly 75% of members came to be deemed non-contributing.
◆ Open a formal consultation with current SFDP members, with a stated process and timeline.
◆ Publish objective criteria and an application process for contribution-based delegation, to run alongside discretionary delegation.
◆ Answer the first-principles question: Why does the SFDP strictly value a new validator over a contributor who has honestly operated for years to improve the Solana network?
The Foundation says these changes are about getting to what comes next. We agree that is the goal. What should not come next is booting Solana's contributors to the curb.
L33
We appreciate the Foundation responding publicly. Conversations at Breakpoint and Block Zero are valuable, but public discourse lets operators who cannot attend those events be heard too. And there is real agreement in the response, so let's start there.
The response says Solana is much larger than when SFDP started, that the validator set has matured, and that the network faces challenges nobody conceived of at the beginning. We agree. We said the same thing in our letter. Solana is entering its next stage, and delegation should evolve with it.
Where we part ways is what that evolution looks like. If the network has matured, the goalposts should move. Instead, SFDP is being redefined to complete its original goal again. That is not the next stage. It is the first stage on a loop, except the new rules boot the long-term contributors who are the output of the first stage and replace them with short-term 12 month tenants. The network trades operators who stayed for years for operators who are built to leave. It regressed, not progressed.
Supporting new validators and supporting existing contributors are not mutually exclusive. A mature program does both. These rules prioritize only one group, and it is not the existing talent.
First Principles
The question is simple: Why does the new program value a brand new validator over one that has been operating reliably for three or more years?
New validators will continue to receive stake. Validators who have run through every upgrade, every outage, and every cluster test since 2023 will lose it. We have read the announcement and the response several times and cannot construct the argument that makes the first group more valuable to network health than the second. If that argument exists, we would like to hear it.
Alpenglow Community Cluster
In follow-up comments, the Foundation said the Alpenglow community cluster participants provided crucial help, that they should be directly rewarded, and that these changes exist in part to make that possible. We welcome that. It is the first time the Foundation has said it.
But it raises more questions than it answers.
First, none of this was communicated with the initial announcement. The announcement said: you are out, the offboarding tranches start now. Only after independent validators pushed back publicly did the Foundation say contributors would be rewarded. And when asked how, the answer was opaque. Operators who ran the cluster at their own expense did not know until this week that they were about to lose their delegation, and still do not know whether they will get any of it back.
Second, the Foundation says that with so much stake tied up in SFDP there was no way to reward the cluster participants. That is hard to accept. SFDP currently holds over 10 million SOL in residual. Rewarding a group of cluster participants materially would not have required dismantling the program as we know it.
Third, the people the Foundation now says it wants to reward are the people being retired first. If the intent is to reward them, the sequence should be reward first, then restructure. Not retire, then promise.
So if participating in the cluster is seen as valuable, will they be rewarded? Why does the retirement proceed before that is defined?
"We reward contributors" is still not a program
One of the responses says the intent is not to make running a validator a secondary activity, but to directly reward those improving network health. We agree with that framing entirely. It is close to word for word what our letter proposed. The response also says validators who contribute to network health should be rewarded, and points to past discretionary delegations to Blueshift and early Frankendancer operators as proof. We agree those were good decisions and believe discretionary delegations should continue to exist. But a handful of discretionary delegations is not a system.
In addition, intent is not process. There are still no criteria, no application, and no timeline. Most contributors did not know discretionary delegation existed until this response. Now that they do, they have no idea how to access it or whether they qualify. "We staked to these guys before" is not an answer to "how do I survive on solana." Meanwhile contributors are shutting down nodes and cancelling Breakpoint trips because the only concrete thing they have been told is that their stake is leaving.
This is not an argument against discretionary delegation. It is an argument for giving contributors something concrete to grasp to. Objective criteria show talented operators what the network values and can grow the contributor count. Discretionary delegation catches what the criteria miss. Both together work. Discretion alone asks everyone to trust a process they cannot see.
On the feedback
Asked to publish the feedback behind these changes, the Foundation pointed to a Discord channel where SFDP validators call out malicious or harmful operators.
We know the channel. The people in it do real work. But that is not feedback on program design. It is validators reporting bad actors, and if the problem was bad actors, the obvious response was to bring those validators in and use their tools to remove the bad actors directly. Instead these changes aimed to retire the people doing the reporting along with the people they were reporting. There is a real chance good actors are now shut down for having spent their time calling out bad ones to improve the network.
The changes themselves
The response says SFDP was not reactive enough. On that, fair. The 1M SOL cap was badly outdated. But these changes do not trim fat. They cut into bone.
The delegation cut: The validators who survive the retirement see their SFDP delegation drop from roughly 85k SOL to 55k. A 30k- 35k SOL cut is a severe hit for any independent validator, from any source. For many it is the difference between profitable and not.
The twelve-month retirement: An automatic clock tells every operator in the program that they are a tenant with an eviction date. That is not how you retain the people you want. An annual review that renews contributors and removes the inactive would achieve the same accountability without the eviction notice.
The 100-validator cap: If more than 100 operators meet the criteria, why turn them away? If fewer do, the cap is irrelevant. Either way it serves no purpose except to signal scarcity. Was any analysis done to arrive at 100? If so, can it be published? If the other changes are implemented, the program likely lands near that number on its own without needing to announce a ceiling.
The timing: Breakpoint and Block Zero are days away. Independent validators who booked travel to attend are now being told they are no longer viable. Some even sponsored events. Some have cancelled their tickets. Some have already turned their validators off. Block Zero in particular is organized, hosted, attended, and sponsored by many of the validators now on the chopping block. At least one sponsor has said publicly that they would have reconsidered their sponsorship had they known they would be losing SFDP stake. These are exactly the people the network should be fighting to keep, and the Foundation chose the week before its own conference to tell them to leave.
The communication problem underneath all of it
Step back and look at the sequence. The announcement said: you are out, tranches start now. Nothing about rewarding contributors. Nothing about Alpenglow. Nothing about where the stake goes. After the community pushed back, the Foundation said contributors would be rewarded but could not say how.
If the plan all along was to support contributors, that should have been the headline, with criteria attached. Instead the people affected have learned about their own future one X reply at a time days later. That is the part that has done the most damage, and it is the easiest to fix.
In conclusion
We are not asking the Foundation to reverse course. We are asking it to sequence this correctly. Our asks, updated from the original letter:
◆ Pause the weekly retirement tranches until communications around not throwing contributors aside is improved.
◆ The Foundation has now said Alpenglow community cluster participants should be rewarded. Additional details on this would be great because as it stands, these people are going to not be profitable soon.
◆ Publish the analysis behind the 300k, 100-validator, twelve-month, and 55k figures.
◆ Publish the impact assessment on the current validator set, including how roughly 75% of members came to be deemed non-contributing.
◆ Open a formal consultation with current SFDP members, with a stated process and timeline.
◆ Publish objective criteria and an application process for contribution-based delegation, to run alongside discretionary delegation.
◆ Answer the first-principles question: Why does the SFDP strictly value a new validator over a contributor who has honestly operated for years to improve the Solana network?
The Foundation says these changes are about getting to what comes next. We agree that is the goal. What should not come next is booting Solana's contributors to the curb.
L33
Let's address a lot of the concerns over the recent SFDP changes.
First, what were the changes?
- 12-month time within SFDP
- Auto-graduation at 300k SOL
- 100 Validator max
- Run your own validator
These changes, as expected, were controversial. There are a lot of assumptions on where this stake will be going after the changes are in place.
The job of SFDP has been three-fold:
1. Help bootstrap net new validators
2. Provide a healthy testnet
3. Get some validators testing changes early
SFDP has done its job. Testnet exists, validators often find issues early, and a large amount of validators have started from SFDP.
Solana is much larger now than when SFDP started. Solana's validator set has matured significantly, has an amazing community, and encounters new challenges that were never conceived of in the beginning.
We've had a lot of feedback that SFDP is no longer reactive enough nor provides enough criteria given the ever-changing landscape of Solana. This feedback is heard and leads us to the next stage of delegation with a focus on continuing to improve network health and rewarding ecosystem contributors.
SFDP will continue to exist for the newer validators and validators that contribute greatly to network health should also be rewarded. We have historically helped fund huge ecosystem contributors such as Blueshift through delegation outside of SFDP. We delegated to a number of validators that tried Frankendancer first. These among many other delegations are success stories that have both pushed Solana to new heights as well as helped improve network health.
We're making a bet that we can be more proactive to future network health concerns, be more reactive to new issues, and help push Solana into this next stage with these changes.
If you have feedback on these changes, please let me know. SFDP helped us get to where we are today. These changes are about getting to what comes next.
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
Google just patched the 8th zero-day exploit this year found in Chrome. Update ASAP!
thehackernews.com/2026/11/google…
thehackernews.com/2026/11/google…
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
Spend time helping those that build on Solana.
Stop giving attention to the grifters who only take.
Stop giving attention to the grifters who only take.
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
> That is centralization in its purest form. There is a harder truth underneath this. The independent validator set was the proof point.
Early community operators were what made Solana credible enough for the people in suits to start paying attention and writing checks. Decentralization was the pitch.
Now that the money has started to arrive, the operators who were the pitch are being shown the door to make room for it.
People who gave Solana their everything deserve better than being used as leverage and then being thrown away.
Decentralization is not a vanity metric. It is not a position to take the moral high ground from when criticizing a competitor like Hyperliquid, and it is not a narrative to be respun each time compliance requirements get clarified.
Decentralization is why this industry exists in the first place.
Early community operators were what made Solana credible enough for the people in suits to start paying attention and writing checks. Decentralization was the pitch.
Now that the money has started to arrive, the operators who were the pitch are being shown the door to make room for it.
People who gave Solana their everything deserve better than being used as leverage and then being thrown away.
Decentralization is not a vanity metric. It is not a position to take the moral high ground from when criticizing a competitor like Hyperliquid, and it is not a narrative to be respun each time compliance requirements get clarified.
Decentralization is why this industry exists in the first place.
An open letter to the Solana Foundation on the new SFDP rules
On November 6, the Solana Foundation announced new rules for the Solana Foundation Delegation Program: a twelve-month membership term, graduation at 300k SOL of external stake, a hard cap of 100 validators, and the retirement of existing members in weekly tranches.
We are writing because we believe these changes work against decentralization, and because they will push out many of the hardest working and best-faith operators Solana has ever had. These are the quiet ones. They do not run marketing campaigns or pick fights on X for impressions. They run nodes, they run them well, and they make valuable contributions to the network while doing it.
◆ The incubator model has not worked ◆
SFDP was built as a launchpad for new validators, and that was the right goal when the validator set needed bootstrapping. That job is done. The goal posts need to move.
On paper, twelve months of delegation followed by forced graduation is a sink-or-swim model: incubate new operators, let natural selection remove the ones who cannot make it. In practice it will play out differently. Validators will join, collect earnings for twelve months, and leave. That is not a net new independent operator. It is a short-term tenant.
The deeper problem is that attracting stake outside SFDP is close to impossible unless you are already in the superminority. The highest-staked validators keep attracting even more stake, so the superminority is shrinking in count while growing in share. Under these rules it sits on top of a constantly churning set of 100 SFDP nodes. Churn is not decentralization. It is a revolving door with an ever-smaller group of ever-larger operators on the other side.
Meanwhile, the operators who actually push the network forward are the ones being cut. The people who tirelessly tested the new governance system before it went live. The people who moved their nodes to different ASNs, at their own cost, because ASN diversity mattered. The people who lose sleep for urgent upgrades. The people who carried Alpenglow to mainnet, which we come back to below. Those are the operators this program is now designed to remove. The longer you have been on Solana, the worse this program is for you.
◆ The Teraswitch outage is the case study ◆
When Teraswitch went down, the network did not halt. It stayed up because enough stake was spread across enough independent validators on enough different ASNs to keep consensus alive. That distribution did not happen by accident. It existed because SFDP supported the number of validators it did and because SFDP created the ASN rule. And stake on Solana increased after the outage. The market saw a network absorb a major provider failure without blinking, and rewarded it.
Shrink the program to 100 validators and concentrate the rest with a handful of operators, and the next provider outage ends very differently. The Foundation is dismantling the exact safety margin that kept the chain from halting.
The numbers are not abstract. At the operator level, Solana's Nakamoto coefficient is 8 today. It was 6 until Alpenglow raised the liveness threshold from 33% to 40%. At the 20% safety threshold, the coefficient is 3. That is a long way from the 18 or so that gets repeated in marketing. These rules push every one of those figures the wrong way.
◆ Alpenglow was carried by independents, and independents are paying for it ◆
Alpenglow did not reach mainnet on its own. It got there because of the community cluster, and the community cluster was run almost entirely by independent validators. Not a single operator from the superminority participated. The largest validators on the network, the ones about to receive the stake being taken from us, contributed nothing to the most important upgrade Solana has shipped.
The history matters. When independent validators raised concerns about 200ms block times and the operational/financial load it put on smaller operators, the Foundation's answer was to participate in the Alpenglow community cluster and accelerate the migration. So we did. We paid for the extra servers. We stayed up until 2 and 4 AM through dozens of regenesis’s. We absorbed weeks of accelerated block times and accompanying doubling vote costs, on the understanding that Alpenglow would make it worth it.
Alpenglow migrated to mainnet a few weeks ago. Before most of us have earned back a fraction of what that period cost, SFDP is retiring us.
The entire burden of 200ms and the Alpenglow migration on independent validators, and the moment the work was done, the Foundation moved to cut us. At minimum, the operators who carried that upgrade should be allowed to run on Alpenglow mainnet under existing delegation for six months before any retirement takes effect. That way they can recover their costs.
◆ Who actually contributes to the network ◆
Measured against stake, lower-staked validators contribute far more back to the network than their higher-staked counterparts. This is not a matter of character. It is structural.
Large operators have investors and shareholders who expect profit to be maximized. Testnet participation, client diversity work, community infrastructure, and governance testing do not make money. The largest operators are therefore discouraged from doing any of it, and for the most part they do not. Alpenglow is the clearest example.
Independent operators are the opposite. We are expected to contribute, we are judged on it, and we do. SFDP spent years building that expectation into its own criteria. The new rules now retire the operators who met the bar and hand the stake to operators who are built not to.
◆ Institutional delegation is moving stake in the wrong direction ◆
Our understanding is that the Foundation intends to redirect stake toward institutional validators. Institutions outsource risk; that is what they do. We expect the long-term result to be institutions white-labelling through a small number of existing superminority operators. Stake taken from independent validators will end up concentrated with the operators who already hold the most of it.
That is centralization in its purest form. There is a harder truth underneath this. The independent validator set was the proof point. Early community operators were what made Solana credible enough for the people in suits to start paying attention and writing checks. Decentralization was the pitch. Now that the money has started to arrive, the operators who were the pitch are being shown the door to make room for it.
People who gave Solana their everything deserve better than being used as leverage and then being thrown away.
Decentralization is not a vanity metric. It is not a position to take the moral high ground from when criticizing a competitor like Hyperliquid, and it is not a narrative to be respun each time compliance requirements get clarified. Decentralization is why this industry exists in the first place.
Institutions are not bad actors (usually). But they are not network stewards. They have no mandate to care about client diversity, ASN spread, or testnet participation, and no operational capacity to contribute to any of it even if they wanted to. The better outcome for everyone is to route that stake to the independent operators who have already proven they will protect it.
◆ SFDP needs a purpose again ◆
If the program no longer exists to support independent operators or diversity, and the incubator model does not work in practice, it is fair to ask what the program exists for.
We propose it becomes a long-term independent contributor program, where the contribution being measured is network health itself: uptime through upgrades, client diversity, ASN and geographic diversity, supporting new innovative initiatives like community cluster participation, governance testing, etc. The operators who carried Alpenglow testing are exactly the people such a program should be rewarding. Inactivity means removal. Operators who do this work should be rewarded for as long as they keep doing it, not retired on a calendar, and not asked to become something other than validators to stay eligible.
That model aligns the program's incentives with the long-term success of the network. Arbitrarily picking 100 validators and churning them once a year aligns them with nothing.
◆ What we are asking for ◆
1. Pause the weekly retirement tranches until the community has been consulted.
2. Give current members who participated in the Alpenglow community cluster a minimum of six months of continued delegation on Alpenglow mainnet before any retirement takes effect.
3. Publish the analysis behind the arbitrary 100-validator cap, and twelve-month figures.
4. Open a formal consultation with current SFDP members before the rules are finalized.
5. Adopt the contributor model above as a replacement for, or alongside, the incubator model.
Solana's resilience was built by people who showed up when it was hard and did not expect to be thanked. We are asking the Foundation not to design them out of the network.
◆ This is what the independent set actually does ◆
The independent validator set, even within Layer33, has been able to achieve many things. Across this group alone, we have:
◆ Supported the official Solana testnet faucet with validator rewards from over 33 million testnet SOL delegated across more than 5k stake accounts, replenishing roughly 450k testnet SOL per month so new validators and developers can deploy before touching mainnet
◆ Built the devnet faucet and the Solana Hardware Compatibility List that operators use to spec machines
◆ Been among the first mainnet validators to run Frankendancer, and later to adopt full Firedancer, on our own hardware, before client diversity was a talking point
◆ Made open source contributions to solana-program, Firedancer, and DoubleZero, plus open source tooling that lets operators switch clients and handle updates automatically
◆ Built a free public API and chart suite for validator and network data that powers dozens of tools and sites across the ecosystem
◆ Built public dashboards that have repeatedly exposed malicious validator behavior around delayed blocks and held bad actors accountable
◆ Shipped the first UI for diagnosing skipped block issues, and staking tools for tip harvesting and stake account cleanup
◆ Co-authored the Validator Voting Behavior Study
Built Nakaflow, which tracks Solana's Nakamoto coefficient against other chains
◆ Contributed to governance design from the beginning, and are key contributors to the new governance platform launching in 2026
◆ Run the monthly validator community call continuously for more than three years
◆ Co-founded the Block Zero validator conference, and organized and sponsored every edition since inception
◆ Built validator infrastructure in underserved regions, including the only major validator between Dallas and Miami and the oldest Brazil-based validator, both on dedicated hardware
◆ Won multiple Solana hackathons
◆ Still host multiple hackathons across Solana every year
◆ Created one of the first Solana-native transaction indexing platforms, used by consumers and teams to understand on-chain activity at scale
◆ Built early DAO and governance tooling adopted by BONK and other Solana-native projects
◆ Built stake pools and delegation tooling that route stake toward performance and decentralization
◆ Reinvested validator revenue into Solana-native startups, hackathon track sponsorships, free web3 security education, and ongoing donations to animal welfare, clean energy, and men's health charities
◆ Kept genesis validators running on our own fleets across multiple locations, delegating our own stake to other operators who contribute to network health
◆ Made up the bulk of the Alpenglow community cluster, on our own servers and our own time, to get the upgrade to mainnet faster
Several of these have been running for three years or more with no end date. That is what a long-term contributor looks like. A twelve-month clock does not describe it.
None of this was required. None of it counts under the new rules. With these changes actioned, institutions like Figment get propped up and the independent validator set gets dismantled. Under that model, none of the above would have existed, and the next round of contributions like these will not exist either.
The independent validator set is normally quiet. We work siloed in our own day-to-day operations. Decentralized, you might say. We focus on validator and network performance, not for ourselves, but so that Solana thrives. For all of us to come together and speak out against a single change means something is truly broken.
This letter may disappear into the void as the Foundation moves to support the large institutional players, the ones who do not care about Solana, at the expense of the people who do. Even so, we wanted our position on the record.
L33
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
the first long-term mithril node on mainnet!
separating the blockbuilding from the client means any new validator client can get world class rewards out of the box by connecting to harmonic; we now support three clients and counting!
harmonic removes the incentives for ient over another, instead allowing operators to focus on client diversity and network health and robustness
separating the blockbuilding from the client means any new validator client can get world class rewards out of the box by connecting to harmonic; we now support three clients and counting!
harmonic removes the incentives for ient over another, instead allowing operators to focus on client diversity and network health and robustness
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
2 years running a Solana validator. What does it look like?
1,144 SOL in rewards. 815 SOL in costs.
Net: 329 SOL. Year 2: −0.7 SOL.
The books are closed, so here's the full P&L, line by line.
Revenue
↳ commissions: 320 SOL
↳ block fees: 772 SOL
↳ Jito tips: 52 SOL
Costs
↳ vote fees: ~1.1 SOL a day, every day, whether you produce blocks or not (790 SOL total, 239 of it covered by SFDP in year 1)
↳ servers: ~$1,960/month paid yearly (265 SOL at the price on each payment date)
↳ my time: not counted (I never billed myself, which is how every validator P&L is wrong)
The stake
↳ year 1: SFDP stake, first-year costs help by the Foundation. @phase_ backed me from the first epoch (5k SOL → 16k at peak)
↳ year 2: mostly paid by the returns of year 1 (server + )
↳ @DynoSolPool: 17.5k SOL from June 2025, the biggest pool delegation until Jito
↳ @doublezero: ~7.5k SOL for a few months in 2025
↳ @JPoolSolana: ~2k SOL in early 2026
↳ Aug 2026: @jito stake lands, 31k SOL
@Layer_33_ put break-even for a zero-commission validator around 160k SOL.
None of those pools got me near 160k and yet I've been able to clear some profits thanks to a few random blocks with big fees
Some hidden costs
↳ Before getting your SFDP stake, you are running a validator that makes 0 money, for as long as it takes to get the stake
↳ Early on I had a few restarts on my machine (Ubuntu auto updates), that did cost me a few epochs of stake each time
↳ Getting called by Pager Duty at 3am is real and a weird experience
↳ Getting stuck in a restart and losing too many credits will get your SFDP stake nuked for a few epochs (that moment when your spare node is on an old version that forked away and a restart was 30 minutes)
↳ I had to handle a Solana upgrade in the middle of the ocean once, was a lot of fun (not)
↳ Paying for 6 months of Alpenglow alphanet (+$500/month) and getting removed from the program a few weeks after AG going live
Alpenglow swaps the per-slot vote fees for an admission ticket of ~0.8 SOL a day. Over my two years that's 573 SOL instead of 790, so net 487 instead of 329. Year 2 alone would have gone from −0.7 to about +118.
I decided never to join the shady pools that were enabling sandwich attacks and other dark patterns. Never joined any dark pools or anything that would have manipulated the end user's funds.
What a ride!
1,144 SOL in rewards. 815 SOL in costs.
Net: 329 SOL. Year 2: −0.7 SOL.
The books are closed, so here's the full P&L, line by line.
Revenue
↳ commissions: 320 SOL
↳ block fees: 772 SOL
↳ Jito tips: 52 SOL
Costs
↳ vote fees: ~1.1 SOL a day, every day, whether you produce blocks or not (790 SOL total, 239 of it covered by SFDP in year 1)
↳ servers: ~$1,960/month paid yearly (265 SOL at the price on each payment date)
↳ my time: not counted (I never billed myself, which is how every validator P&L is wrong)
The stake
↳ year 1: SFDP stake, first-year costs help by the Foundation. @phase_ backed me from the first epoch (5k SOL → 16k at peak)
↳ year 2: mostly paid by the returns of year 1 (server + )
↳ @DynoSolPool: 17.5k SOL from June 2025, the biggest pool delegation until Jito
↳ @doublezero: ~7.5k SOL for a few months in 2025
↳ @JPoolSolana: ~2k SOL in early 2026
↳ Aug 2026: @jito stake lands, 31k SOL
@Layer_33_ put break-even for a zero-commission validator around 160k SOL.
None of those pools got me near 160k and yet I've been able to clear some profits thanks to a few random blocks with big fees
Some hidden costs
↳ Before getting your SFDP stake, you are running a validator that makes 0 money, for as long as it takes to get the stake
↳ Early on I had a few restarts on my machine (Ubuntu auto updates), that did cost me a few epochs of stake each time
↳ Getting called by Pager Duty at 3am is real and a weird experience
↳ Getting stuck in a restart and losing too many credits will get your SFDP stake nuked for a few epochs (that moment when your spare node is on an old version that forked away and a restart was 30 minutes)
↳ I had to handle a Solana upgrade in the middle of the ocean once, was a lot of fun (not)
↳ Paying for 6 months of Alpenglow alphanet (+$500/month) and getting removed from the program a few weeks after AG going live
Alpenglow swaps the per-slot vote fees for an admission ticket of ~0.8 SOL a day. Over my two years that's 573 SOL instead of 790, so net 487 instead of 329. Year 2 alone would have gone from −0.7 to about +118.
I decided never to join the shady pools that were enabling sandwich attacks and other dark patterns. Never joined any dark pools or anything that would have manipulated the end user's funds.
What a ride!
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
Think it's obvious at this point that the foundation is overindexing on removing leaches.
Reading the announced changes, I can't understand any argument from first principles how new validators, which they are going to continue to stake, are more valuable than validators that have been around for 3+ years.
Validator count should go down, I have been on the record saying that for awhile.
Avoiding politics, the main issues are this:
1. Why does the new program value new validators over validators that have been around for 3+ years?
2. What are the funds going to be used for going forward? This is critical to all SOL holders as these funds are in "non circulating" addresses, where if the funds are moved, it's a dilution event for all SOL holders. Because of that, I do think that SOL holders have a right to know and potentially vote what the funds are being used for. github.com/anza-xyz/agave…
Respectfully, I think the new program is likely worse than having no program.
Just my 2 lamports.
Reading the announced changes, I can't understand any argument from first principles how new validators, which they are going to continue to stake, are more valuable than validators that have been around for 3+ years.
Validator count should go down, I have been on the record saying that for awhile.
Avoiding politics, the main issues are this:
1. Why does the new program value new validators over validators that have been around for 3+ years?
2. What are the funds going to be used for going forward? This is critical to all SOL holders as these funds are in "non circulating" addresses, where if the funds are moved, it's a dilution event for all SOL holders. Because of that, I do think that SOL holders have a right to know and potentially vote what the funds are being used for. github.com/anza-xyz/agave…
Respectfully, I think the new program is likely worse than having no program.
Just my 2 lamports.
Man, looking at this list makes me nostalgic for all the stuff we did when the network was growing up. The yearly restarts, the summer of spam, the 3am pager duty calls while constantly being FUDded on the TL.
The problem now is that the network is stable, the software is good (soon: great), and we need to grow.
From that perspective, injecting new blood into the ecosystem is the right move however it doesn't solve the problem of what will happen once a successful team graduates.
There is no easy path from being staked by foundation to being staked independently, unless you are extremely successful (eg. Helius, Jupiter) - and stake keeps centralizing (as pareto distributions do)
Here's my extremely biased take on what @SolanaFndn as VC should do:
1) keep the new program, it is good, call it Seed stage - even if you get 1 in a 100 jupiter's per year, that's a win (VC odds)
2) Don't just shitcan the rest of the network with no warning, there are plenty of good and able contributors (with clankers), work with them to achieve your goals.
Most good validator operators would do anything to see the network succeed, put out an RFP with a 100 ideas and let teams build them. Kinda like @alessandrod did here with low hanging fruit: x.com/alessandrod/st…
Judge on PMF not code quality, etc. Shitcan the non-participants.
As a validator operator, you always wonder what stakers want? Foundation being the biggest staker on the network has a generational opportunity to use its position to get exactly what it wants.
Or, you know, shitcan everyone and hope that magically next time around will be better. Idk, sometimes you just gotta reboot the box.
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
SFDP’s new rules mean our time in the program is up.
We’ve run the same Solana validator since Tour de Sol, before mainnet. We’re independent, with no outside funding. We were an early adopter of Firedancer, genesis validator on the Alpenglow community cluster, we host and participate in the monthly community validator calls and governance sessions regularly, and we build tools for other validators to use.
The SFDP stake is just under 15% for us, but in a market this tight losing it makes it harder to continue to make the contributions that we're making.
If the goal is network health, keep backing the operators who deliver it, rather than retiring them on a fixed schedule. The open letter sets out the asks, and we support it:
We’ve run the same Solana validator since Tour de Sol, before mainnet. We’re independent, with no outside funding. We were an early adopter of Firedancer, genesis validator on the Alpenglow community cluster, we host and participate in the monthly community validator calls and governance sessions regularly, and we build tools for other validators to use.
The SFDP stake is just under 15% for us, but in a market this tight losing it makes it harder to continue to make the contributions that we're making.
If the goal is network health, keep backing the operators who deliver it, rather than retiring them on a fixed schedule. The open letter sets out the asks, and we support it:
An open letter to the Solana Foundation on the new SFDP rules
On November 6, the Solana Foundation announced new rules for the Solana Foundation Delegation Program: a twelve-month membership term, graduation at 300k SOL of external stake, a hard cap of 100 validators, and the retirement of existing members in weekly tranches.
We are writing because we believe these changes work against decentralization, and because they will push out many of the hardest working and best-faith operators Solana has ever had. These are the quiet ones. They do not run marketing campaigns or pick fights on X for impressions. They run nodes, they run them well, and they make valuable contributions to the network while doing it.
◆ The incubator model has not worked ◆
SFDP was built as a launchpad for new validators, and that was the right goal when the validator set needed bootstrapping. That job is done. The goal posts need to move.
On paper, twelve months of delegation followed by forced graduation is a sink-or-swim model: incubate new operators, let natural selection remove the ones who cannot make it. In practice it will play out differently. Validators will join, collect earnings for twelve months, and leave. That is not a net new independent operator. It is a short-term tenant.
The deeper problem is that attracting stake outside SFDP is close to impossible unless you are already in the superminority. The highest-staked validators keep attracting even more stake, so the superminority is shrinking in count while growing in share. Under these rules it sits on top of a constantly churning set of 100 SFDP nodes. Churn is not decentralization. It is a revolving door with an ever-smaller group of ever-larger operators on the other side.
Meanwhile, the operators who actually push the network forward are the ones being cut. The people who tirelessly tested the new governance system before it went live. The people who moved their nodes to different ASNs, at their own cost, because ASN diversity mattered. The people who lose sleep for urgent upgrades. The people who carried Alpenglow to mainnet, which we come back to below. Those are the operators this program is now designed to remove. The longer you have been on Solana, the worse this program is for you.
◆ The Teraswitch outage is the case study ◆
When Teraswitch went down, the network did not halt. It stayed up because enough stake was spread across enough independent validators on enough different ASNs to keep consensus alive. That distribution did not happen by accident. It existed because SFDP supported the number of validators it did and because SFDP created the ASN rule. And stake on Solana increased after the outage. The market saw a network absorb a major provider failure without blinking, and rewarded it.
Shrink the program to 100 validators and concentrate the rest with a handful of operators, and the next provider outage ends very differently. The Foundation is dismantling the exact safety margin that kept the chain from halting.
The numbers are not abstract. At the operator level, Solana's Nakamoto coefficient is 8 today. It was 6 until Alpenglow raised the liveness threshold from 33% to 40%. At the 20% safety threshold, the coefficient is 3. That is a long way from the 18 or so that gets repeated in marketing. These rules push every one of those figures the wrong way.
◆ Alpenglow was carried by independents, and independents are paying for it ◆
Alpenglow did not reach mainnet on its own. It got there because of the community cluster, and the community cluster was run almost entirely by independent validators. Not a single operator from the superminority participated. The largest validators on the network, the ones about to receive the stake being taken from us, contributed nothing to the most important upgrade Solana has shipped.
The history matters. When independent validators raised concerns about 200ms block times and the operational/financial load it put on smaller operators, the Foundation's answer was to participate in the Alpenglow community cluster and accelerate the migration. So we did. We paid for the extra servers. We stayed up until 2 and 4 AM through dozens of regenesis’s. We absorbed weeks of accelerated block times and accompanying doubling vote costs, on the understanding that Alpenglow would make it worth it.
Alpenglow migrated to mainnet a few weeks ago. Before most of us have earned back a fraction of what that period cost, SFDP is retiring us.
The entire burden of 200ms and the Alpenglow migration on independent validators, and the moment the work was done, the Foundation moved to cut us. At minimum, the operators who carried that upgrade should be allowed to run on Alpenglow mainnet under existing delegation for six months before any retirement takes effect. That way they can recover their costs.
◆ Who actually contributes to the network ◆
Measured against stake, lower-staked validators contribute far more back to the network than their higher-staked counterparts. This is not a matter of character. It is structural.
Large operators have investors and shareholders who expect profit to be maximized. Testnet participation, client diversity work, community infrastructure, and governance testing do not make money. The largest operators are therefore discouraged from doing any of it, and for the most part they do not. Alpenglow is the clearest example.
Independent operators are the opposite. We are expected to contribute, we are judged on it, and we do. SFDP spent years building that expectation into its own criteria. The new rules now retire the operators who met the bar and hand the stake to operators who are built not to.
◆ Institutional delegation is moving stake in the wrong direction ◆
Our understanding is that the Foundation intends to redirect stake toward institutional validators. Institutions outsource risk; that is what they do. We expect the long-term result to be institutions white-labelling through a small number of existing superminority operators. Stake taken from independent validators will end up concentrated with the operators who already hold the most of it.
That is centralization in its purest form. There is a harder truth underneath this. The independent validator set was the proof point. Early community operators were what made Solana credible enough for the people in suits to start paying attention and writing checks. Decentralization was the pitch. Now that the money has started to arrive, the operators who were the pitch are being shown the door to make room for it.
People who gave Solana their everything deserve better than being used as leverage and then being thrown away.
Decentralization is not a vanity metric. It is not a position to take the moral high ground from when criticizing a competitor like Hyperliquid, and it is not a narrative to be respun each time compliance requirements get clarified. Decentralization is why this industry exists in the first place.
Institutions are not bad actors (usually). But they are not network stewards. They have no mandate to care about client diversity, ASN spread, or testnet participation, and no operational capacity to contribute to any of it even if they wanted to. The better outcome for everyone is to route that stake to the independent operators who have already proven they will protect it.
◆ SFDP needs a purpose again ◆
If the program no longer exists to support independent operators or diversity, and the incubator model does not work in practice, it is fair to ask what the program exists for.
We propose it becomes a long-term independent contributor program, where the contribution being measured is network health itself: uptime through upgrades, client diversity, ASN and geographic diversity, supporting new innovative initiatives like community cluster participation, governance testing, etc. The operators who carried Alpenglow testing are exactly the people such a program should be rewarding. Inactivity means removal. Operators who do this work should be rewarded for as long as they keep doing it, not retired on a calendar, and not asked to become something other than validators to stay eligible.
That model aligns the program's incentives with the long-term success of the network. Arbitrarily picking 100 validators and churning them once a year aligns them with nothing.
◆ What we are asking for ◆
1. Pause the weekly retirement tranches until the community has been consulted.
2. Give current members who participated in the Alpenglow community cluster a minimum of six months of continued delegation on Alpenglow mainnet before any retirement takes effect.
3. Publish the analysis behind the arbitrary 100-validator cap, and twelve-month figures.
4. Open a formal consultation with current SFDP members before the rules are finalized.
5. Adopt the contributor model above as a replacement for, or alongside, the incubator model.
Solana's resilience was built by people who showed up when it was hard and did not expect to be thanked. We are asking the Foundation not to design them out of the network.
◆ This is what the independent set actually does ◆
The independent validator set, even within Layer33, has been able to achieve many things. Across this group alone, we have:
◆ Supported the official Solana testnet faucet with validator rewards from over 33 million testnet SOL delegated across more than 5k stake accounts, replenishing roughly 450k testnet SOL per month so new validators and developers can deploy before touching mainnet
◆ Built the devnet faucet and the Solana Hardware Compatibility List that operators use to spec machines
◆ Been among the first mainnet validators to run Frankendancer, and later to adopt full Firedancer, on our own hardware, before client diversity was a talking point
◆ Made open source contributions to solana-program, Firedancer, and DoubleZero, plus open source tooling that lets operators switch clients and handle updates automatically
◆ Built a free public API and chart suite for validator and network data that powers dozens of tools and sites across the ecosystem
◆ Built public dashboards that have repeatedly exposed malicious validator behavior around delayed blocks and held bad actors accountable
◆ Shipped the first UI for diagnosing skipped block issues, and staking tools for tip harvesting and stake account cleanup
◆ Co-authored the Validator Voting Behavior Study
Built Nakaflow, which tracks Solana's Nakamoto coefficient against other chains
◆ Contributed to governance design from the beginning, and are key contributors to the new governance platform launching in 2026
◆ Run the monthly validator community call continuously for more than three years
◆ Co-founded the Block Zero validator conference, and organized and sponsored every edition since inception
◆ Built validator infrastructure in underserved regions, including the only major validator between Dallas and Miami and the oldest Brazil-based validator, both on dedicated hardware
◆ Won multiple Solana hackathons
◆ Still host multiple hackathons across Solana every year
◆ Created one of the first Solana-native transaction indexing platforms, used by consumers and teams to understand on-chain activity at scale
◆ Built early DAO and governance tooling adopted by BONK and other Solana-native projects
◆ Built stake pools and delegation tooling that route stake toward performance and decentralization
◆ Reinvested validator revenue into Solana-native startups, hackathon track sponsorships, free web3 security education, and ongoing donations to animal welfare, clean energy, and men's health charities
◆ Kept genesis validators running on our own fleets across multiple locations, delegating our own stake to other operators who contribute to network health
◆ Made up the bulk of the Alpenglow community cluster, on our own servers and our own time, to get the upgrade to mainnet faster
Several of these have been running for three years or more with no end date. That is what a long-term contributor looks like. A twelve-month clock does not describe it.
None of this was required. None of it counts under the new rules. With these changes actioned, institutions like Figment get propped up and the independent validator set gets dismantled. Under that model, none of the above would have existed, and the next round of contributions like these will not exist either.
The independent validator set is normally quiet. We work siloed in our own day-to-day operations. Decentralized, you might say. We focus on validator and network performance, not for ourselves, but so that Solana thrives. For all of us to come together and speak out against a single change means something is truly broken.
This letter may disappear into the void as the Foundation moves to support the large institutional players, the ones who do not care about Solana, at the expense of the people who do. Even so, we wanted our position on the record.
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"I think the goal of SFDP needs to change now. Not only helping new validators onboard, but also supporting the validators who have been here and believed in Solana for a long time."
At this moment, we can't really say who is right and who is wrong in the whole SFDP debate over the new rules.
@SolanaFndn has valid reasons for changing the SFDP rules, and they are also right about the job SFDP meant to do.
- help new validators get onboarded
- maintain a proper ecosystem for testnet
But we also need to hear what the independent operators are trying to say.
SFDP is supporting almost 337 validators right now. If the new rules reduce that to 100, what happens to the others who depend on it?
Most of them have been in SFDP for a long time and have continuously supported the network through everything, but with these new rules, most of them will be removed.
They paid for infra and operating costs to support the network and grow with it, and these new rules won't help them.
I think the goal of SFDP needs to change now. Not only helping new validators onboard, but also supporting the validators who have been here and believed in Solana for a long time.
The Foundation said new validators will have a chance and it will be t we don't have any details on that yet. It would be better to have clear criteria.
I think it would be better to start removing validators one by one based on performance, and continue the stake for all the current SFDP validators until then.
Most validators depend on SFDP just to break even on their costs. If they are removed suddenly, they can't even make pennies, and some will stop running validators. A few already have.
I hope everything reaches a proper conclusion at Breakpoint, and everyone benefits from this, not only the large entities.
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Regarding "why just before Breakpoint"
@ChainflowSol decided to again sponsor Block Zero, this year, in addition to co-organizing it
This expense isn't insignificant to us and we would have had to at least reconsider our sponsorship had we known we'd be losing SFDP stake
@ChainflowSol decided to again sponsor Block Zero, this year, in addition to co-organizing it
This expense isn't insignificant to us and we would have had to at least reconsider our sponsorship had we known we'd be losing SFDP stake
A few thoughts on Jacobs response and the SFDP changes.
- SFDP is wildly successful and clearly we need to work on that messaging. I don't work for the Solana Foundation so I don't have all the data but I can already present way more successful examples then Jacob has below.
- "We've had a lot of feedback that SFDP is no longer reactive enough nor provides enough criteria given the ever-changing landscape of Solana." No offense but these people probably have no clue. Based on the inability for the SF to actually communicate the success of their own program... I'm not entirely surprised.
- Removing whitelabels from the program is a HUGE positive. The biggest strength of the SFDP is through its operators and individual humans. White labels destroy that.
- There is a straight 35k sol delegation cut to operators that survive. Currently 85kish, moving to 55k. Big loss. And this is not soley a SFDP issue. If validators lose 30k for any souce, its a huge loss. That's how slim margins are.
- The 12 month automatic retirement feels weird and makes folks instantly feel like they are getting booted to the curb. Annual review feels much better.
- 100 validator max - Feels unnecessarily combatitive. You could probably just hit 100 by implementing the above steps and not need to say "100 validator max".
- Why do this before Breakpoint? There are a ton of indepedent validators coming to Breakpoint who are now told they will no longer be profitable and need to shut down. Some have cancelled tickets. Some are now at a loss. These are the WARM BODIES we want to keep.
- Why do this right after AG testing? Right after 2x voting fees? All of these items compound into just really "feels bad man".
I have a lot more thoughts but I'll end here for now with a two final thoughts...
1) A lot of folks that are upset are probably the very same people who will actually survive the purge. Because they are active and actually care. Versus the 100+ validators who probably haven't even read the announcement yet. But why put them through this? These folks may shut down before the applications for retirement are even processed. I doubt Tim or the Foundation will process the retirement applications any time soon due to Breakpoint. It's a lot of worry and heartache targeting those who were never the targets.
2) Validators are overall NOT software engineers. If we were, we would be working directly for blockchain companies. We are "tech adjacent". That has severely hampered our ability to build next level applications that some folks think validators should be building. But guess what? Indepent validators have VISION, and often sntrepreneurial skills. A bit of that intangible spirit that everyone is searching for. Why ? Because AI is solving the technical moat. We are seeing more and more appliations being built from SFDP recipients throug the use of AI. And its seeing exponential increase. Do not NUKE the warm bodies right when before that exponential curve takes off.
@solana @SolanaFndn @TimGarcia0 @jacobvcreech
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
I do wonder if the Matthew effect is the underlying problem: stake attracts stake. Without protocol-level intervention, the largest validators gain a compounding advantage, while smaller validators struggle to remain economically viable.
Decentralization cannot rely on goodwill to overcome an incentive structure that naturally concentrates power. It has to be engineered into the protocol. How? That’s TBD.
Decentralization cannot rely on goodwill to overcome an incentive structure that naturally concentrates power. It has to be engineered into the protocol. How? That’s TBD.
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
The Solana Foundation is keeping its new validator rules, and some validators will lose its stake.
On 10 November, @jacobvcreech of the Solana Foundation answered the backlash. His verdict on the program that lends Foundation stake to independent validators: it "has done its job."
The rules he listed:
- 12 months maximum in the program
- graduation at 300,000 SOL of outside stake
- a maximum of 100 validators
- run your own validator
The independent validator collective @Layer_33_ had asked for the weekly retirements to stop until members were consulted. Creech did not announce a pause.
"There will be validators removed from the original sfdp," he wrote. "We're making a bet we can do more for network health by discretionary staking."
So who gets that stake? Validators that "contribute greatly to network health," in his words. He named Blueshift and the first validators to run Frankendancer, an early build of the Firedancer client, as past examples.
Existing members can apply to stay by submitting their contributions. More than 100 already have, Creech said.
How many stay is the open number. Creech wrote that 100 "was more than the current remaining sfdp set." The Foundation's own dashboard showed 327 validators receiving its stake at epoch 1080.
Asked whether the aim is fewer validators, he replied: "No, but we know that may be a side effect if we cannot find enough good contributors."
The rules are going in "slowly," he said, and "discussion is happening now." Validators in the program can find the renewal and contribution forms in the Foundation's FAQ.
On 10 November, @jacobvcreech of the Solana Foundation answered the backlash. His verdict on the program that lends Foundation stake to independent validators: it "has done its job."
The rules he listed:
- 12 months maximum in the program
- graduation at 300,000 SOL of outside stake
- a maximum of 100 validators
- run your own validator
The independent validator collective @Layer_33_ had asked for the weekly retirements to stop until members were consulted. Creech did not announce a pause.
"There will be validators removed from the original sfdp," he wrote. "We're making a bet we can do more for network health by discretionary staking."
So who gets that stake? Validators that "contribute greatly to network health," in his words. He named Blueshift and the first validators to run Frankendancer, an early build of the Firedancer client, as past examples.
Existing members can apply to stay by submitting their contributions. More than 100 already have, Creech said.
How many stay is the open number. Creech wrote that 100 "was more than the current remaining sfdp set." The Foundation's own dashboard showed 327 validators receiving its stake at epoch 1080.
Asked whether the aim is fewer validators, he replied: "No, but we know that may be a side effect if we cannot find enough good contributors."
The rules are going in "slowly," he said, and "discussion is happening now." Validators in the program can find the renewal and contribution forms in the Foundation's FAQ.
Let's address a lot of the concerns over the recent SFDP changes.
First, what were the changes?
- 12-month time within SFDP
- Auto-graduation at 300k SOL
- 100 Validator max
- Run your own validator
These changes, as expected, were controversial. There are a lot of assumptions on where this stake will be going after the changes are in place.
The job of SFDP has been three-fold:
1. Help bootstrap net new validators
2. Provide a healthy testnet
3. Get some validators testing changes early
SFDP has done its job. Testnet exists, validators often find issues early, and a large amount of validators have started from SFDP.
Solana is much larger now than when SFDP started. Solana's validator set has matured significantly, has an amazing community, and encounters new challenges that were never conceived of in the beginning.
We've had a lot of feedback that SFDP is no longer reactive enough nor provides enough criteria given the ever-changing landscape of Solana. This feedback is heard and leads us to the next stage of delegation with a focus on continuing to improve network health and rewarding ecosystem contributors.
SFDP will continue to exist for the newer validators and validators that contribute greatly to network health should also be rewarded. We have historically helped fund huge ecosystem contributors such as Blueshift through delegation outside of SFDP. We delegated to a number of validators that tried Frankendancer first. These among many other delegations are success stories that have both pushed Solana to new heights as well as helped improve network health.
We're making a bet that we can be more proactive to future network health concerns, be more reactive to new issues, and help push Solana into this next stage with these changes.
If you have feedback on these changes, please let me know. SFDP helped us get to where we are today. These changes are about getting to what comes next.
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
I'm looking forward to feedback at block zero and in discord. Small validators who make big impacts on the ecosystem will continue to thrive.
Let's address a lot of the concerns over the recent SFDP changes.
First, what were the changes?
- 12-month time within SFDP
- Auto-graduation at 300k SOL
- 100 Validator max
- Run your own validator
These changes, as expected, were controversial. There are a lot of assumptions on where this stake will be going after the changes are in place.
The job of SFDP has been three-fold:
1. Help bootstrap net new validators
2. Provide a healthy testnet
3. Get some validators testing changes early
SFDP has done its job. Testnet exists, validators often find issues early, and a large amount of validators have started from SFDP.
Solana is much larger now than when SFDP started. Solana's validator set has matured significantly, has an amazing community, and encounters new challenges that were never conceived of in the beginning.
We've had a lot of feedback that SFDP is no longer reactive enough nor provides enough criteria given the ever-changing landscape of Solana. This feedback is heard and leads us to the next stage of delegation with a focus on continuing to improve network health and rewarding ecosystem contributors.
SFDP will continue to exist for the newer validators and validators that contribute greatly to network health should also be rewarded. We have historically helped fund huge ecosystem contributors such as Blueshift through delegation outside of SFDP. We delegated to a number of validators that tried Frankendancer first. These among many other delegations are success stories that have both pushed Solana to new heights as well as helped improve network health.
We're making a bet that we can be more proactive to future network health concerns, be more reactive to new issues, and help push Solana into this next stage with these changes.
If you have feedback on these changes, please let me know. SFDP helped us get to where we are today. These changes are about getting to what comes next.
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
I hope @SolanaFndn takes the time to read and respond to @Layer_33_ open letter thoughtfully and publicly.
Commitment to Decentralization is of paramount importance.
Commitment to Decentralization is of paramount importance.
An open letter to the Solana Foundation on the new SFDP rules
On November 6, the Solana Foundation announced new rules for the Solana Foundation Delegation Program: a twelve-month membership term, graduation at 300k SOL of external stake, a hard cap of 100 validators, and the retirement of existing members in weekly tranches.
We are writing because we believe these changes work against decentralization, and because they will push out many of the hardest working and best-faith operators Solana has ever had. These are the quiet ones. They do not run marketing campaigns or pick fights on X for impressions. They run nodes, they run them well, and they make valuable contributions to the network while doing it.
◆ The incubator model has not worked ◆
SFDP was built as a launchpad for new validators, and that was the right goal when the validator set needed bootstrapping. That job is done. The goal posts need to move.
On paper, twelve months of delegation followed by forced graduation is a sink-or-swim model: incubate new operators, let natural selection remove the ones who cannot make it. In practice it will play out differently. Validators will join, collect earnings for twelve months, and leave. That is not a net new independent operator. It is a short-term tenant.
The deeper problem is that attracting stake outside SFDP is close to impossible unless you are already in the superminority. The highest-staked validators keep attracting even more stake, so the superminority is shrinking in count while growing in share. Under these rules it sits on top of a constantly churning set of 100 SFDP nodes. Churn is not decentralization. It is a revolving door with an ever-smaller group of ever-larger operators on the other side.
Meanwhile, the operators who actually push the network forward are the ones being cut. The people who tirelessly tested the new governance system before it went live. The people who moved their nodes to different ASNs, at their own cost, because ASN diversity mattered. The people who lose sleep for urgent upgrades. The people who carried Alpenglow to mainnet, which we come back to below. Those are the operators this program is now designed to remove. The longer you have been on Solana, the worse this program is for you.
◆ The Teraswitch outage is the case study ◆
When Teraswitch went down, the network did not halt. It stayed up because enough stake was spread across enough independent validators on enough different ASNs to keep consensus alive. That distribution did not happen by accident. It existed because SFDP supported the number of validators it did and because SFDP created the ASN rule. And stake on Solana increased after the outage. The market saw a network absorb a major provider failure without blinking, and rewarded it.
Shrink the program to 100 validators and concentrate the rest with a handful of operators, and the next provider outage ends very differently. The Foundation is dismantling the exact safety margin that kept the chain from halting.
The numbers are not abstract. At the operator level, Solana's Nakamoto coefficient is 8 today. It was 6 until Alpenglow raised the liveness threshold from 33% to 40%. At the 20% safety threshold, the coefficient is 3. That is a long way from the 18 or so that gets repeated in marketing. These rules push every one of those figures the wrong way.
◆ Alpenglow was carried by independents, and independents are paying for it ◆
Alpenglow did not reach mainnet on its own. It got there because of the community cluster, and the community cluster was run almost entirely by independent validators. Not a single operator from the superminority participated. The largest validators on the network, the ones about to receive the stake being taken from us, contributed nothing to the most important upgrade Solana has shipped.
The history matters. When independent validators raised concerns about 200ms block times and the operational/financial load it put on smaller operators, the Foundation's answer was to participate in the Alpenglow community cluster and accelerate the migration. So we did. We paid for the extra servers. We stayed up until 2 and 4 AM through dozens of regenesis’s. We absorbed weeks of accelerated block times and accompanying doubling vote costs, on the understanding that Alpenglow would make it worth it.
Alpenglow migrated to mainnet a few weeks ago. Before most of us have earned back a fraction of what that period cost, SFDP is retiring us.
The entire burden of 200ms and the Alpenglow migration on independent validators, and the moment the work was done, the Foundation moved to cut us. At minimum, the operators who carried that upgrade should be allowed to run on Alpenglow mainnet under existing delegation for six months before any retirement takes effect. That way they can recover their costs.
◆ Who actually contributes to the network ◆
Measured against stake, lower-staked validators contribute far more back to the network than their higher-staked counterparts. This is not a matter of character. It is structural.
Large operators have investors and shareholders who expect profit to be maximized. Testnet participation, client diversity work, community infrastructure, and governance testing do not make money. The largest operators are therefore discouraged from doing any of it, and for the most part they do not. Alpenglow is the clearest example.
Independent operators are the opposite. We are expected to contribute, we are judged on it, and we do. SFDP spent years building that expectation into its own criteria. The new rules now retire the operators who met the bar and hand the stake to operators who are built not to.
◆ Institutional delegation is moving stake in the wrong direction ◆
Our understanding is that the Foundation intends to redirect stake toward institutional validators. Institutions outsource risk; that is what they do. We expect the long-term result to be institutions white-labelling through a small number of existing superminority operators. Stake taken from independent validators will end up concentrated with the operators who already hold the most of it.
That is centralization in its purest form. There is a harder truth underneath this. The independent validator set was the proof point. Early community operators were what made Solana credible enough for the people in suits to start paying attention and writing checks. Decentralization was the pitch. Now that the money has started to arrive, the operators who were the pitch are being shown the door to make room for it.
People who gave Solana their everything deserve better than being used as leverage and then being thrown away.
Decentralization is not a vanity metric. It is not a position to take the moral high ground from when criticizing a competitor like Hyperliquid, and it is not a narrative to be respun each time compliance requirements get clarified. Decentralization is why this industry exists in the first place.
Institutions are not bad actors (usually). But they are not network stewards. They have no mandate to care about client diversity, ASN spread, or testnet participation, and no operational capacity to contribute to any of it even if they wanted to. The better outcome for everyone is to route that stake to the independent operators who have already proven they will protect it.
◆ SFDP needs a purpose again ◆
If the program no longer exists to support independent operators or diversity, and the incubator model does not work in practice, it is fair to ask what the program exists for.
We propose it becomes a long-term independent contributor program, where the contribution being measured is network health itself: uptime through upgrades, client diversity, ASN and geographic diversity, supporting new innovative initiatives like community cluster participation, governance testing, etc. The operators who carried Alpenglow testing are exactly the people such a program should be rewarding. Inactivity means removal. Operators who do this work should be rewarded for as long as they keep doing it, not retired on a calendar, and not asked to become something other than validators to stay eligible.
That model aligns the program's incentives with the long-term success of the network. Arbitrarily picking 100 validators and churning them once a year aligns them with nothing.
◆ What we are asking for ◆
1. Pause the weekly retirement tranches until the community has been consulted.
2. Give current members who participated in the Alpenglow community cluster a minimum of six months of continued delegation on Alpenglow mainnet before any retirement takes effect.
3. Publish the analysis behind the arbitrary 100-validator cap, and twelve-month figures.
4. Open a formal consultation with current SFDP members before the rules are finalized.
5. Adopt the contributor model above as a replacement for, or alongside, the incubator model.
Solana's resilience was built by people who showed up when it was hard and did not expect to be thanked. We are asking the Foundation not to design them out of the network.
◆ This is what the independent set actually does ◆
The independent validator set, even within Layer33, has been able to achieve many things. Across this group alone, we have:
◆ Supported the official Solana testnet faucet with validator rewards from over 33 million testnet SOL delegated across more than 5k stake accounts, replenishing roughly 450k testnet SOL per month so new validators and developers can deploy before touching mainnet
◆ Built the devnet faucet and the Solana Hardware Compatibility List that operators use to spec machines
◆ Been among the first mainnet validators to run Frankendancer, and later to adopt full Firedancer, on our own hardware, before client diversity was a talking point
◆ Made open source contributions to solana-program, Firedancer, and DoubleZero, plus open source tooling that lets operators switch clients and handle updates automatically
◆ Built a free public API and chart suite for validator and network data that powers dozens of tools and sites across the ecosystem
◆ Built public dashboards that have repeatedly exposed malicious validator behavior around delayed blocks and held bad actors accountable
◆ Shipped the first UI for diagnosing skipped block issues, and staking tools for tip harvesting and stake account cleanup
◆ Co-authored the Validator Voting Behavior Study
Built Nakaflow, which tracks Solana's Nakamoto coefficient against other chains
◆ Contributed to governance design from the beginning, and are key contributors to the new governance platform launching in 2026
◆ Run the monthly validator community call continuously for more than three years
◆ Co-founded the Block Zero validator conference, and organized and sponsored every edition since inception
◆ Built validator infrastructure in underserved regions, including the only major validator between Dallas and Miami and the oldest Brazil-based validator, both on dedicated hardware
◆ Won multiple Solana hackathons
◆ Still host multiple hackathons across Solana every year
◆ Created one of the first Solana-native transaction indexing platforms, used by consumers and teams to understand on-chain activity at scale
◆ Built early DAO and governance tooling adopted by BONK and other Solana-native projects
◆ Built stake pools and delegation tooling that route stake toward performance and decentralization
◆ Reinvested validator revenue into Solana-native startups, hackathon track sponsorships, free web3 security education, and ongoing donations to animal welfare, clean energy, and men's health charities
◆ Kept genesis validators running on our own fleets across multiple locations, delegating our own stake to other operators who contribute to network health
◆ Made up the bulk of the Alpenglow community cluster, on our own servers and our own time, to get the upgrade to mainnet faster
Several of these have been running for three years or more with no end date. That is what a long-term contributor looks like. A twelve-month clock does not describe it.
None of this was required. None of it counts under the new rules. With these changes actioned, institutions like Figment get propped up and the independent validator set gets dismantled. Under that model, none of the above would have existed, and the next round of contributions like these will not exist either.
The independent validator set is normally quiet. We work siloed in our own day-to-day operations. Decentralized, you might say. We focus on validator and network performance, not for ourselves, but so that Solana thrives. For all of us to come together and speak out against a single change means something is truly broken.
This letter may disappear into the void as the Foundation moves to support the large institutional players, the ones who do not care about Solana, at the expense of the people who do. Even so, we wanted our position on the record.
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
🚨JUST IN: A collective of independent @Solana validators, @Layer_33_, has called for a pause in validator removals under new SFDP rules, which remove existing members in weekly groups and limit participation to 12 months, after which validators lose the program’s stake support.
the program’s new 100-validator cap and 12-month term “work against decentralization” by pushing out experienced independent operators and concentrating stake among larger validators. “
the program’s new 100-validator cap and 12-month term “work against decentralization” by pushing out experienced independent operators and concentrating stake among larger validators. “
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©flows / Chainflow retweeted
Independent validators who say they helped get Alpenglow to mainnet are asking the Solana Foundation to stop retiring them.
Layer33, a collective of independent Solana validators, published an open letter on Monday. It asks the Foundation to pause the weekly retirements under its new delegation program rules.
The Solana Foundation Delegation Program lends Foundation-owned SOL to independent validators, so they can earn rewards while they build a staker base of their own.
New rules took effect on 6 November. Membership now lasts 12 months, and validators retire once they attract more than 300,000 SOL from other sources.
Layer33's members are among the operators who stand to lose that stake. Their sharpest argument is about timing.
Alpenglow, Solana's new consensus upgrade, went live on mainnet on 21 October. Layer33 says independent validators ran most of the community test cluster, paid for extra servers and absorbed higher vote costs along the way.
"Before most of us have earned back a fraction of what that period cost, SFDP is retiring us."
The letter makes five requests:
- pause the weekly retirement tranches until the community is consulted
- six more months of delegation for operators who ran the Alpenglow test cluster
- publish the analysis behind the 100-validator and 12-month figures
- a formal consultation with current members
- a long-term "contributor model" that rewards uptime, client diversity and network spread
Its summary of the stakes: "Churn is not decentralization."
The Foundation describes the program as a starting point. Jacob Creech (@jacobvcreech) of the Solana Foundation wrote on 6 November that one of its goals "is to help these validators onboard," and that validators who want to last have "a lot of objective performance criteria to go after."
The letter's first request is the pause on weekly retirements. Neither Creech nor the Foundation had responded to it by Monday night.
Layer33, a collective of independent Solana validators, published an open letter on Monday. It asks the Foundation to pause the weekly retirements under its new delegation program rules.
The Solana Foundation Delegation Program lends Foundation-owned SOL to independent validators, so they can earn rewards while they build a staker base of their own.
New rules took effect on 6 November. Membership now lasts 12 months, and validators retire once they attract more than 300,000 SOL from other sources.
Layer33's members are among the operators who stand to lose that stake. Their sharpest argument is about timing.
Alpenglow, Solana's new consensus upgrade, went live on mainnet on 21 October. Layer33 says independent validators ran most of the community test cluster, paid for extra servers and absorbed higher vote costs along the way.
"Before most of us have earned back a fraction of what that period cost, SFDP is retiring us."
The letter makes five requests:
- pause the weekly retirement tranches until the community is consulted
- six more months of delegation for operators who ran the Alpenglow test cluster
- publish the analysis behind the 100-validator and 12-month figures
- a formal consultation with current members
- a long-term "contributor model" that rewards uptime, client diversity and network spread
Its summary of the stakes: "Churn is not decentralization."
The Foundation describes the program as a starting point. Jacob Creech (@jacobvcreech) of the Solana Foundation wrote on 6 November that one of its goals "is to help these validators onboard," and that validators who want to last have "a lot of objective performance criteria to go after."
The letter's first request is the pause on weekly retirements. Neither Creech nor the Foundation had responded to it by Monday night.
An open letter to the Solana Foundation on the new SFDP rules
On November 6, the Solana Foundation announced new rules for the Solana Foundation Delegation Program: a twelve-month membership term, graduation at 300k SOL of external stake, a hard cap of 100 validators, and the retirement of existing members in weekly tranches.
We are writing because we believe these changes work against decentralization, and because they will push out many of the hardest working and best-faith operators Solana has ever had. These are the quiet ones. They do not run marketing campaigns or pick fights on X for impressions. They run nodes, they run them well, and they make valuable contributions to the network while doing it.
◆ The incubator model has not worked ◆
SFDP was built as a launchpad for new validators, and that was the right goal when the validator set needed bootstrapping. That job is done. The goal posts need to move.
On paper, twelve months of delegation followed by forced graduation is a sink-or-swim model: incubate new operators, let natural selection remove the ones who cannot make it. In practice it will play out differently. Validators will join, collect earnings for twelve months, and leave. That is not a net new independent operator. It is a short-term tenant.
The deeper problem is that attracting stake outside SFDP is close to impossible unless you are already in the superminority. The highest-staked validators keep attracting even more stake, so the superminority is shrinking in count while growing in share. Under these rules it sits on top of a constantly churning set of 100 SFDP nodes. Churn is not decentralization. It is a revolving door with an ever-smaller group of ever-larger operators on the other side.
Meanwhile, the operators who actually push the network forward are the ones being cut. The people who tirelessly tested the new governance system before it went live. The people who moved their nodes to different ASNs, at their own cost, because ASN diversity mattered. The people who lose sleep for urgent upgrades. The people who carried Alpenglow to mainnet, which we come back to below. Those are the operators this program is now designed to remove. The longer you have been on Solana, the worse this program is for you.
◆ The Teraswitch outage is the case study ◆
When Teraswitch went down, the network did not halt. It stayed up because enough stake was spread across enough independent validators on enough different ASNs to keep consensus alive. That distribution did not happen by accident. It existed because SFDP supported the number of validators it did and because SFDP created the ASN rule. And stake on Solana increased after the outage. The market saw a network absorb a major provider failure without blinking, and rewarded it.
Shrink the program to 100 validators and concentrate the rest with a handful of operators, and the next provider outage ends very differently. The Foundation is dismantling the exact safety margin that kept the chain from halting.
The numbers are not abstract. At the operator level, Solana's Nakamoto coefficient is 8 today. It was 6 until Alpenglow raised the liveness threshold from 33% to 40%. At the 20% safety threshold, the coefficient is 3. That is a long way from the 18 or so that gets repeated in marketing. These rules push every one of those figures the wrong way.
◆ Alpenglow was carried by independents, and independents are paying for it ◆
Alpenglow did not reach mainnet on its own. It got there because of the community cluster, and the community cluster was run almost entirely by independent validators. Not a single operator from the superminority participated. The largest validators on the network, the ones about to receive the stake being taken from us, contributed nothing to the most important upgrade Solana has shipped.
The history matters. When independent validators raised concerns about 200ms block times and the operational/financial load it put on smaller operators, the Foundation's answer was to participate in the Alpenglow community cluster and accelerate the migration. So we did. We paid for the extra servers. We stayed up until 2 and 4 AM through dozens of regenesis’s. We absorbed weeks of accelerated block times and accompanying doubling vote costs, on the understanding that Alpenglow would make it worth it.
Alpenglow migrated to mainnet a few weeks ago. Before most of us have earned back a fraction of what that period cost, SFDP is retiring us.
The entire burden of 200ms and the Alpenglow migration on independent validators, and the moment the work was done, the Foundation moved to cut us. At minimum, the operators who carried that upgrade should be allowed to run on Alpenglow mainnet under existing delegation for six months before any retirement takes effect. That way they can recover their costs.
◆ Who actually contributes to the network ◆
Measured against stake, lower-staked validators contribute far more back to the network than their higher-staked counterparts. This is not a matter of character. It is structural.
Large operators have investors and shareholders who expect profit to be maximized. Testnet participation, client diversity work, community infrastructure, and governance testing do not make money. The largest operators are therefore discouraged from doing any of it, and for the most part they do not. Alpenglow is the clearest example.
Independent operators are the opposite. We are expected to contribute, we are judged on it, and we do. SFDP spent years building that expectation into its own criteria. The new rules now retire the operators who met the bar and hand the stake to operators who are built not to.
◆ Institutional delegation is moving stake in the wrong direction ◆
Our understanding is that the Foundation intends to redirect stake toward institutional validators. Institutions outsource risk; that is what they do. We expect the long-term result to be institutions white-labelling through a small number of existing superminority operators. Stake taken from independent validators will end up concentrated with the operators who already hold the most of it.
That is centralization in its purest form. There is a harder truth underneath this. The independent validator set was the proof point. Early community operators were what made Solana credible enough for the people in suits to start paying attention and writing checks. Decentralization was the pitch. Now that the money has started to arrive, the operators who were the pitch are being shown the door to make room for it.
People who gave Solana their everything deserve better than being used as leverage and then being thrown away.
Decentralization is not a vanity metric. It is not a position to take the moral high ground from when criticizing a competitor like Hyperliquid, and it is not a narrative to be respun each time compliance requirements get clarified. Decentralization is why this industry exists in the first place.
Institutions are not bad actors (usually). But they are not network stewards. They have no mandate to care about client diversity, ASN spread, or testnet participation, and no operational capacity to contribute to any of it even if they wanted to. The better outcome for everyone is to route that stake to the independent operators who have already proven they will protect it.
◆ SFDP needs a purpose again ◆
If the program no longer exists to support independent operators or diversity, and the incubator model does not work in practice, it is fair to ask what the program exists for.
We propose it becomes a long-term independent contributor program, where the contribution being measured is network health itself: uptime through upgrades, client diversity, ASN and geographic diversity, supporting new innovative initiatives like community cluster participation, governance testing, etc. The operators who carried Alpenglow testing are exactly the people such a program should be rewarding. Inactivity means removal. Operators who do this work should be rewarded for as long as they keep doing it, not retired on a calendar, and not asked to become something other than validators to stay eligible.
That model aligns the program's incentives with the long-term success of the network. Arbitrarily picking 100 validators and churning them once a year aligns them with nothing.
◆ What we are asking for ◆
1. Pause the weekly retirement tranches until the community has been consulted.
2. Give current members who participated in the Alpenglow community cluster a minimum of six months of continued delegation on Alpenglow mainnet before any retirement takes effect.
3. Publish the analysis behind the arbitrary 100-validator cap, and twelve-month figures.
4. Open a formal consultation with current SFDP members before the rules are finalized.
5. Adopt the contributor model above as a replacement for, or alongside, the incubator model.
Solana's resilience was built by people who showed up when it was hard and did not expect to be thanked. We are asking the Foundation not to design them out of the network.
◆ This is what the independent set actually does ◆
The independent validator set, even within Layer33, has been able to achieve many things. Across this group alone, we have:
◆ Supported the official Solana testnet faucet with validator rewards from over 33 million testnet SOL delegated across more than 5k stake accounts, replenishing roughly 450k testnet SOL per month so new validators and developers can deploy before touching mainnet
◆ Built the devnet faucet and the Solana Hardware Compatibility List that operators use to spec machines
◆ Been among the first mainnet validators to run Frankendancer, and later to adopt full Firedancer, on our own hardware, before client diversity was a talking point
◆ Made open source contributions to solana-program, Firedancer, and DoubleZero, plus open source tooling that lets operators switch clients and handle updates automatically
◆ Built a free public API and chart suite for validator and network data that powers dozens of tools and sites across the ecosystem
◆ Built public dashboards that have repeatedly exposed malicious validator behavior around delayed blocks and held bad actors accountable
◆ Shipped the first UI for diagnosing skipped block issues, and staking tools for tip harvesting and stake account cleanup
◆ Co-authored the Validator Voting Behavior Study
Built Nakaflow, which tracks Solana's Nakamoto coefficient against other chains
◆ Contributed to governance design from the beginning, and are key contributors to the new governance platform launching in 2026
◆ Run the monthly validator community call continuously for more than three years
◆ Co-founded the Block Zero validator conference, and organized and sponsored every edition since inception
◆ Built validator infrastructure in underserved regions, including the only major validator between Dallas and Miami and the oldest Brazil-based validator, both on dedicated hardware
◆ Won multiple Solana hackathons
◆ Still host multiple hackathons across Solana every year
◆ Created one of the first Solana-native transaction indexing platforms, used by consumers and teams to understand on-chain activity at scale
◆ Built early DAO and governance tooling adopted by BONK and other Solana-native projects
◆ Built stake pools and delegation tooling that route stake toward performance and decentralization
◆ Reinvested validator revenue into Solana-native startups, hackathon track sponsorships, free web3 security education, and ongoing donations to animal welfare, clean energy, and men's health charities
◆ Kept genesis validators running on our own fleets across multiple locations, delegating our own stake to other operators who contribute to network health
◆ Made up the bulk of the Alpenglow community cluster, on our own servers and our own time, to get the upgrade to mainnet faster
Several of these have been running for three years or more with no end date. That is what a long-term contributor looks like. A twelve-month clock does not describe it.
None of this was required. None of it counts under the new rules. With these changes actioned, institutions like Figment get propped up and the independent validator set gets dismantled. Under that model, none of the above would have existed, and the next round of contributions like these will not exist either.
The independent validator set is normally quiet. We work siloed in our own day-to-day operations. Decentralized, you might say. We focus on validator and network performance, not for ourselves, but so that Solana thrives. For all of us to come together and speak out against a single change means something is truly broken.
This letter may disappear into the void as the Foundation moves to support the large institutional players, the ones who do not care about Solana, at the expense of the people who do. Even so, we wanted our position on the record.
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