Getting onboarded means receiving an email from the Solana Foundation notifying you that 1) your status is now approved and 2) you are eligible to receive a delegation of stake from the Solana Foundation if your validator node on mainnet beta meets the stated performance criteria outlined in the delegation criteria.

Once your node on mainnet beta meets the stated performance criteria outlined on the delegation criteria page, it may take up to 6 epochs for the stake delegation from the Solana Foundation to become active.

Yes. In order to remain eligible to receive stake delegation from the Solana Foundation, all validators in the Delegation Program must also maintain a well-performing (i.e. staked) testnet node.

To be onboarded to the Delegation Program, applicants (individuals, DAOs, or teams) must be able to explain and demonstrate that they have contributed to the Solana Ecosystem in some meaningful way and be able to provide an explanation on how they will be able to run a performant validator that attracts outside stake. Contributions to the Solana ecosystem can materialize in many forms and we rely on the applicants to make a case for their contributions.

Some examples of contributions include, but are not limited to:

• Building a protocol on Solana with real users.
• Organizing or hosting community events such as meetups, hackathons, and conferences to engage the Solana community.
• Building developer tools that achieve significant adoption.
• Building public good utilities that are widely adopted.
• Producing Solana-based educational content with a significant audience (videos, articles, etc).
• Authoring or participating in the SIMD process.
• Entering and getting recognized in a Solana Hackathon.
• Developing Solana-focused, open-source tools and libraries.

• for participants in the United States
• for participants in other countries

Follow these steps to join the Solana Foundation Delegation Program:

1. Create your keys: Create your testnet and mainnet keys using the solana-keygen program, which is installed with the Solana CLI.
2. Submit your application: Describe your contributions to the Solana Ecosystem using this form.
3. Get approved: Receive notification from the Foundation that your application has been accepted.
4. Register your keys: Sign up with your testnet and mainnet keys on the Delegation Program homepage.
5. Start your validator: Assuming you've passed KYC and signed up successfully, you can now start running your testnet validator. Follow the steps in the validator docs to do so.
6. Begin voting: The bot will pick up all new testnet keypairs within two weeks of registering. In the meantime, you can follow these instructions to airdrop yourself some testnet SOL and start voting!

After you’ve started up your testnet validator, you can airdrop yourself some test SOL to get started. You can follow these instructions to learn how to do so.

No. This email confirms that you have registered for the program. You will not be onboarded and receive a delegation as part of the Solana Foundation Delegation Program until you are onboarded. To understand when you will be onboarded please refer to the questions above.

Please note that you can start your testnet validator at any time. The stake bot will see your testnet validator in the order you signed up. 100 new validators will be added to the stake bot at a time, each week, according to when they signed up. Depending on the backlog of validators that signed up, it may take weeks or even months to be added to the testnet stakebot. To determine approximately when you will be added to the testnet stakebot, locate your validator page on the validators search page and find the approximate date under “Program metrics” on your page.

After the stake bot sees you (see question above to understand what this entails), and you meet the criteria outlined on the delegation criteria page, you will be eligible to receive stake from the stake bot on testnet. Note: In order to meet the criteria you need to start voting. You can airdrop yourself some testnet SOL in order to start voting with these instructions.

There are no rewards for running a validator on testnet which means you run the validator at your own cost. Running a testnet validator for months without compensation is a financial decision that every validator must make for themselves. Please note if you stop running your testnet validator, you will lose your place in the onboarding queue.

Great question! You can of course start a testnet (and/or mainnet) node at any time. You can self stake or attract external stake in many ways. A few such options could be 1) starting a website and explaining why delegators should stake to you, 2) starting a stake pool that promotes decentralization, or 3) joining a stake pool and receiving additional delegation from them. These are just a few ideas, your fellow validators will have more (and better) ideas for how to do this well.

To see the most up-to-date requirements for receiving a delegation from the foundation please see the delegation criteria page.

If you would like to calculate your vote credits from scratch, you can run solana vote-account <vote_account_address> --output json. You may have to run this over a few epochs to get a full 64 epochs worth of data.

To see your total vote credits (used in the numerator of the vote credits score calculation) and the max vote credits for each epoch (used in the denominator of the vote credits score calculation), you can refer to the expanded table in your validator page. You can find your validator page by searching by your testnet identity key on https://solana.org/validators-search.

Vote credits are earned when a validator submits a consensus vote on a block that becomes finalized by the network. Each vote on a finalized block earns 1 vote credit. You can learn more about what vote credits are in the stake delegation and rewards doc and the importance of them to the Delegation Program on the delegation criteria page.

Retired status means your validator has been permanently removed from the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP) and will no longer receive stake delegations from the Solana Foundation. This occurs as part of the foundation's "onboard 1, offboard 3" policy designed to cycle validators through the program.

Retirement Criteria: Validators are typically retired when they meet all of the following conditions:

• Have been eligible for foundation delegation on mainnet for at least 18 months
• Have low independent stake outside the foundation program (below 5,000 SOL)
• Are selected for offboarding to make room for new program participants

What This Means: Retirement is not a penalty or performance violation. It's a natural part of the program designed to:

• Encourage validator independence from foundation support
• Cycle out validators unlikely to become self-sustaining
• Make space for new validators to join the program
• Maintain network decentralization and operational efficiency

Retired validators can continue operating their validator nodes on Solana's permissionless network and seek stake delegations from other sources in the ecosystem.

Assuming sufficient performance, after an epoch has ended, the total number of vote credits earned during that epoch for each participant is computed. Then for each validator the tapering percent is computed by looking at the number of epochs since onboarding. The table below shows the tapering schedule. Once the total for each validator is computed, the appropriate amount of lamports are sent to the validator identity account.

After each epoch, the total stake the validator has that is not from the delegation program is computed and matched, by a certain ratio and up to a certain limit (see below for the match limit and match ratio schedule) and that stake is added to the residual stake that all SFDP participants receive.

Example stake calculations with an assumption of 15,000 SOL as residual, a 50k stake matching limit, and a 0.5 match ratio:

The percentage of non-foundation stake SFDP will match, and the maximum amount of stake that will be matched will be gradually reduced from 100% and 100,000 SOL to 50% and 50,000 SOL. The schedule for this reduction is as follows:

The residual stake amount varies from epoch to epoch. The residual stake amount is computed by dividing the remainder of the SOL in SFDP after all stake matching has been computed by the number of SFDP participants that meet the residual performance requirements. Then each validator receives this residual stake on top of any matching stake they received from the SFDP.

If the number of validators increases or more sol is matched through stake matching then the total residual stake will decrease. Conversely if less stake is matched or there are less validators to split the remainder between, the residual stake amount will increase.

The Required Versions API endpoint returns the software versions that must be run for upcoming epochs to receive stake from the Solana Foundation Delegation Program. API Documentation »