Pinned Tweet
Bit of an announcement
Tomorrow marks my last day as CTO of @solstrategies
It's been an absolutely incredible ride. From starting @orangefincrypto , to coming onto SOL Strategies, to being the first Solana focused company ever to get listed on Nasdaq, to being the staking provider for an ETF, to so much more, it's been an experience I wouldn't trade for the world.
None of it would be possible without the amazing team I had the pleasure of interacting with. This includes @michael_hubbard , @Ehrls15 , @AfroMonkey404 , @coderigo , @TrilliumJohn and more that aren't on X, but appreciate them just as much. Thank you to all of you for being amazing to work with.
Additionally, I wanted to give a shout out to the @darklakefi team that have already brought such amazing energy and ideas to the company in @vitorpy , @DuchessofSOL , @yesjess , and the rest of the team. I'm super excited to see what the rest of you build!
Lastly, as far as the team goes, I'd like to also give a public shout out to @LeahWald , @TonyGuoga , and @moeadham . Thank you for bringing me on board, taking a chance on me, and teaching me many things I'll take with me for the rest of my life.
In addition to the team, I'd like to shout all the investors and ecosystem teams I have had the pleasure of working with. There's far too many to name, and because I don't want to risk forgetting to include one, I won't name any. But please know if I have ever talked to you, I appreciate you 🙏.
As for what's next, I'll continue to be involved in SOL Strategies as a consultant, helping to ensure everything operates smoothly and providing help in any place I can. Additionally, I plan on trying to find a happy balance between touching grass and experimenting with AI more 😀.
My thoughts on Solana and crypto overall remain unchanged. If you are a builder on Solana and need (free) help with anything such as intros, fundraising, technical advice, etc, don't hesitate to reach out. If there is a way I can help you, I intend to do my best to do so.
Thank you 🫶
Tomorrow marks my last day as CTO of @solstrategies
It's been an absolutely incredible ride. From starting @orangefincrypto , to coming onto SOL Strategies, to being the first Solana focused company ever to get listed on Nasdaq, to being the staking provider for an ETF, to so much more, it's been an experience I wouldn't trade for the world.
None of it would be possible without the amazing team I had the pleasure of interacting with. This includes @michael_hubbard , @Ehrls15 , @AfroMonkey404 , @coderigo , @TrilliumJohn and more that aren't on X, but appreciate them just as much. Thank you to all of you for being amazing to work with.
Additionally, I wanted to give a shout out to the @darklakefi team that have already brought such amazing energy and ideas to the company in @vitorpy , @DuchessofSOL , @yesjess , and the rest of the team. I'm super excited to see what the rest of you build!
Lastly, as far as the team goes, I'd like to also give a public shout out to @LeahWald , @TonyGuoga , and @moeadham . Thank you for bringing me on board, taking a chance on me, and teaching me many things I'll take with me for the rest of my life.
In addition to the team, I'd like to shout all the investors and ecosystem teams I have had the pleasure of working with. There's far too many to name, and because I don't want to risk forgetting to include one, I won't name any. But please know if I have ever talked to you, I appreciate you 🙏.
As for what's next, I'll continue to be involved in SOL Strategies as a consultant, helping to ensure everything operates smoothly and providing help in any place I can. Additionally, I plan on trying to find a happy balance between touching grass and experimenting with AI more 😀.
My thoughts on Solana and crypto overall remain unchanged. If you are a builder on Solana and need (free) help with anything such as intros, fundraising, technical advice, etc, don't hesitate to reach out. If there is a way I can help you, I intend to do my best to do so.
Thank you 🫶
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Max Kaplan 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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Max Kaplan retweeted
If Fndn goes ahead with these SFDP changes, I would at least like to see the big dogs (who are historically useless when it comes to anything other than collecting staking rewards) absorb the independent operators and talent that have kept the lights on for many years.
That way, they can actually participate in a way you would expect from a large val with tens of millions at stake.
Would be a great shame to let that passion and expertise go to waste
That way, they can actually participate in a way you would expect from a large val with tens of millions at stake.
Would be a great shame to let that passion and expertise go to waste
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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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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Crypto is short for North Korean Venture Capital
🚨INSIGHT: North Korean hackers are laundering funds stolen in the $6.4B @Binance hack through disposable memecoins, including an "Elon 2028 President" token, according to Elliptic.
They create worthless tokens, pair them with real assets in DEX liquidity pools, then use and sell the tokens, making stolen funds appear as proceeds from ordinary trades.
On @Solana, the hackers swapped stolen SOL into existing wrapped and thinly traded tokens before selling them for USDC and moving funds across chains.
On NEAR, six newly created memecoins were used to move around 117,000 NEAR ($430K).
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Max Kaplan retweeted
The infrastructure layer just got an upgrade. We’ve completely rebuilt our digital home from the metal up - delivering a faster, sharper, and more intuitive experience for deploying at the edge.
Explore the new site: edgevana.com
Explore the new site: edgevana.com
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Max Kaplan retweeted
We’re excited to announce that Unruggable has raised $500K in strategic funding.
Led by @colosseum & an incredible group of investors across Solana.
Led by @colosseum & an incredible group of investors across Solana.
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Max Kaplan retweeted
Android's 2026 November security update includes a fix for a zero-click remote code execution vulnerability CVE-2026-58868.
Would be good to get @solanamobile Seekers on to this patch level ASAP 🙏
source.android.com/docs/security/…
Would be good to get @solanamobile Seekers on to this patch level ASAP 🙏
source.android.com/docs/security/…
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Yet another reason you don't want boxes facing the internet that don't need to.
May I present to you, sshhole.
Arguably the worst one yet 🙈🙈🙈: sshhole.com
May I present to you, sshhole.
Arguably the worst one yet 🙈🙈🙈: sshhole.com
Re CVE-2026-98432: if you have machines that have public IPs that don't need them, you are either lazy, cheap, and / or naive. Sorry.
I've written a lot about this in the past.
Yes, AI has discovered many new vulnerabilities at a rapid rate. However, it hasn't changed one of the most fundamental cybersecurity practices out there:
Removing your host from the internet removes almost all possible outside exploits.
Just do it.
Blocking with firewall rules does not accomplish this (ie: RCEs). The machine should not be routable to the public Internet if it doesn't need to be. Most machines do not, and can NAT traffic out / have traffic proxied in.
Clearly, this does not prevent all possible attacks, and many attacks involve threat actors compromising employees with privileged network access. That's a whole different discussion.
That isn't an excuse however to just put every machine you have on the internet.
Take your boxes off the internet. One of the most basic things you can do.
Same applies to k8s clusters fwiw. Keep your API off the internet plz.
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Max Kaplan retweeted
People keep posting the snippet from
DPRK but yall missing the beauty of the full statement. 😄
Pyongyang, November 3 (KCNA) -- Kim Yo Jong, department director of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, released the following press statement on November 2:
rrency worth billions of U.S. dollars was stolen at the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange "Binance". As regards this extra-large incident, the U.S. has made a trite provocation of linking it with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea again.
The FBI is trying to brand the DPRK as a "cyber criminal state", claiming that it obtained information that a hacking organization "supported" by the DPRK was involved in the incident.
But the U.S. assertion is an absurd rhetoric and nothing new.
This is not the first time that the U.S. has attempted to spread misunderstanding of the DPRK in the international community, blindly linking the DPRK with the "cyber crime" incidents whenever they occur on an international scale.
Last year, the U.S. also tried to blame the DPRK for the hacking incident at the cryptocurrency exchange called "Bybit".
It is a grave political provocation against the DPRK that the U.S. misleads the international public opinion as if all the cyber crimes in different parts of the world are our deeds.
This is a sinister attempt to damage the international image of the DPRK and undermine its dignity and national prestige and another grave violation of the sovereignty of the DPRK in the new sphere.
It is the consistent policy stand of the DPRK government to resolutely oppose all sorts of malicious acts in cyberspace, the wealth common to the mankind, and resolutely reject any attempt to politicize the cyber issue and use it as a means of interfering in the internal affairs with other countries.
The international community needs to recall once again the fact that as soon as the present U.S. administration took office last year, it announced that it would confiscate illegally stolen cryptocurrency assets and use them as a state's strategic reserve.
If it carefully examines who will get the large amount of the so-called stolen cryptocurrency when the latter is retrieved, it may get a clue about who is behind the hacking incident.
On this occasion, we confirmed Washington's hostile attitude toward the DPRK once again and are closely monitoring a variety of persistent provocations of the U.S. against our state.
We have issues to reconsider in diverse aspects as regards the very unpleasant U.S. hostile attitude. -0-
DPRK but yall missing the beauty of the full statement. 😄
Pyongyang, November 3 (KCNA) -- Kim Yo Jong, department director of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, released the following press statement on November 2:
rrency worth billions of U.S. dollars was stolen at the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange "Binance". As regards this extra-large incident, the U.S. has made a trite provocation of linking it with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea again.
The FBI is trying to brand the DPRK as a "cyber criminal state", claiming that it obtained information that a hacking organization "supported" by the DPRK was involved in the incident.
But the U.S. assertion is an absurd rhetoric and nothing new.
This is not the first time that the U.S. has attempted to spread misunderstanding of the DPRK in the international community, blindly linking the DPRK with the "cyber crime" incidents whenever they occur on an international scale.
Last year, the U.S. also tried to blame the DPRK for the hacking incident at the cryptocurrency exchange called "Bybit".
It is a grave political provocation against the DPRK that the U.S. misleads the international public opinion as if all the cyber crimes in different parts of the world are our deeds.
This is a sinister attempt to damage the international image of the DPRK and undermine its dignity and national prestige and another grave violation of the sovereignty of the DPRK in the new sphere.
It is the consistent policy stand of the DPRK government to resolutely oppose all sorts of malicious acts in cyberspace, the wealth common to the mankind, and resolutely reject any attempt to politicize the cyber issue and use it as a means of interfering in the internal affairs with other countries.
The international community needs to recall once again the fact that as soon as the present U.S. administration took office last year, it announced that it would confiscate illegally stolen cryptocurrency assets and use them as a state's strategic reserve.
If it carefully examines who will get the large amount of the so-called stolen cryptocurrency when the latter is retrieved, it may get a clue about who is behind the hacking incident.
On this occasion, we confirmed Washington's hostile attitude toward the DPRK once again and are closely monitoring a variety of persistent provocations of the U.S. against our state.
We have issues to reconsider in diverse aspects as regards the very unpleasant U.S. hostile attitude. -0-
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Max Kaplan retweeted
A sad and terrible hack has just taken place on @solana, resulting in losses of nearly $1 million.
"King" (or 7dGrd) was the best-known MEV/arbitrage program, active on the chain for several years and inspired many of the arbitrage programs currently on the chain to develop and hey generated several million dollars in profit, notably serving as the market leader between 2024 and 2025; an arbitrage "dinosaur" that had established itself as a leader, managing to find arbitrage opportunities before anyone else with a team of engineers behind it who were highly knowledgeable about the entire ecosystem and finance in general.
I will always remember February 14, 2025; the one and only day and moment in Circular's existence when I witnessed a single transaction that generated nearly $1 million in profit for an arbitrageur… just one transaction.
8h ago, their main wallet was completely drained (~$1m) and the funds were bridged to ETH using Mayan.
This race toward AI helps all of us, whether as entrepreneurs, companies or even individuals to accelerate and move ever faster, but the security issues that come with it are sometimes far more serious.
Main wallet: circular.fi/address/7dGrdJ…
Program: King7ki4SKMBPb3iupnQwTyjsq294jaXsgLmJo8cb7T
Biggest tx: 37rxtpQCEeWt1VLDtXmMSjM37FVmuHXeXZpr8mKdZco8rx9vgbAFKT6YuekK8JfaZmb5cJM4Ehe99fz2GgitHGFo
Bridge tx: 51bDaPjhubvhyzE5DJcHU4wEshuEXYgUrVtLbwpAYPgoeQyzt5NoSe1AqeFMiMgi8EGCJ6f5JtmDXr5EAAdHRDV2
"King" (or 7dGrd) was the best-known MEV/arbitrage program, active on the chain for several years and inspired many of the arbitrage programs currently on the chain to develop and hey generated several million dollars in profit, notably serving as the market leader between 2024 and 2025; an arbitrage "dinosaur" that had established itself as a leader, managing to find arbitrage opportunities before anyone else with a team of engineers behind it who were highly knowledgeable about the entire ecosystem and finance in general.
I will always remember February 14, 2025; the one and only day and moment in Circular's existence when I witnessed a single transaction that generated nearly $1 million in profit for an arbitrageur… just one transaction.
8h ago, their main wallet was completely drained (~$1m) and the funds were bridged to ETH using Mayan.
This race toward AI helps all of us, whether as entrepreneurs, companies or even individuals to accelerate and move ever faster, but the security issues that come with it are sometimes far more serious.
Main wallet: circular.fi/address/7dGrdJ…
Program: King7ki4SKMBPb3iupnQwTyjsq294jaXsgLmJo8cb7T
Biggest tx: 37rxtpQCEeWt1VLDtXmMSjM37FVmuHXeXZpr8mKdZco8rx9vgbAFKT6YuekK8JfaZmb5cJM4Ehe99fz2GgitHGFo
Bridge tx: 51bDaPjhubvhyzE5DJcHU4wEshuEXYgUrVtLbwpAYPgoeQyzt5NoSe1AqeFMiMgi8EGCJ6f5JtmDXr5EAAdHRDV2
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To put this into perspective, Coinbase ($COIN ), one of crypto's most valuable companies, is currently valued at $37B.
Kraken's last round was at $21B.
North Korea has unfortunately become one of crypto's biggest "success" stories.
Sad.
Kraken's last round was at $21B.
North Korea has unfortunately become one of crypto's biggest "success" stories.
Sad.
DATA: North Korea’s Lazarus Group has stolen ~$11.87B in crypto to date, equivalent to 45% of North Korea’s GDP following the $6.3B @binance hack, per @Darkfost_Coc.
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Max Kaplan retweeted
> Our upgrade didn’t fix the vulnerability: Upgrading to GitLab 19.3.6 on October 22 didn’t fix the vulnerability. The fix isn’t in GitLab’s own code but in a patch to Ruby, which GitLab applies only in its official packages. Our image used standard Ruby, so it didn’t get the patch.
You think it is easy to patch, yeah?
You think it is easy to patch, yeah?
Uhhh yeah, this is a big reason why any vuln in GitLab is such a massive deal.
This could have been really, really bad.
Props to alpine team for detecting and mitigating properly
alpinelinux.org/posts/GitLab-s…
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Uhhh yeah, this is a big reason why any vuln in GitLab is such a massive deal.
This could have been really, really bad.
Props to alpine team for detecting and mitigating properly
alpinelinux.org/posts/GitLab-s…
This could have been really, really bad.
Props to alpine team for detecting and mitigating properly
alpinelinux.org/posts/GitLab-s…
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