Solana Validator Economics

At a high-level, Solana validators’ revenue sources are made up of:

• Inflationary Rewards (i.e., SOL issuance)
• Base Fees
• Priority Fees
• Out-of-Protocol Tips (i.e., Jito Tips)

As Solana’s inflationary rewards gradually taper (down to ~4.8% annual inflation recently), fees and out-of-protocol tips have become critical to validator earnings. Priority fees and tips are used when users want to execute the same transaction at the same time as other users and effectively outbid each other to be first, which is often referred to as competition for contentious transactions. Priority fees have grown substantially with increased network activity (led primarily by memecoin activity on the chain), which has contributed to a significant share of total staking returns, making up for the disinflation down from the initial 8%. More recently, we’ve seen proposals such as SIMD-228 to reduce inflation even further, towards the long-term inflation rate target of 1.5% more quickly.

Notably, in addition to the above revenue sources, validators can also monetize by:

• Selling their shreds (as validators with a lot of stake receive information on the blocks faster than validators with low stake)
• Selling their swQoS connections to users/projects that want to send their transactions directly to the leader
• Doing MEV on their own leader slots

Inflationary Staking Rewards

Similarly to most PoS chains, Solana inflates their supply to pay staking rewards each epoch (approximately every 2-3 days). As mentioned, the initial inflation rate started at 8%, and is set to decay by 15% yearly to a long-term target rate of 15% (currently sits at ~4.8%).

Inflationary rewards per validator depend on stake weight, block production and their commission rate:

• Stake Weight: Validators earn rewards in proportion to the amount of SOL staked to them (both self-staked and delegated stake). Validators with higher stake receive a larger portion of the inflation rewards pool.
• Block Production: Validators must actively produce blocks to earn rewards. If a validator fails to produce blocks during its leader slots, it will not earn the maximum possible rewards. Higher uptime and block production lead to more rewards.
• Commission Rate: Each validator sets a commission on rewards earned by delegators. Delegators receive their share of the rewards after the validator’s commission is deducted. Validators can currently only set a commission rate for issuance rewards - SIMD-123 (discussed later) will enable them to also set an in-protocol commission rate for priority fees.

There have recently been further discussion within the Solana ecosystem about reducing inflationary rewards and relying on priority fees and out-of-protocol tips, specifically with SIMD-228. These are discussed further below. In short, SIMD-228 proposes to adjust inflation based on a target staking ratio and instead rely more on transaction fees, priority fees and Jito Tips to reduce dilution and issuance.

Transaction and Priority Fees

On Solana, each transaction includes a base fee to deter spam - similar to most chains. If a validator produces a block, they earn the transaction fees for that block. Solana assigns leader slots for future epochs based on stake weight, so validators with more stake are allocated more leader slots than those with less stake. Additionally, Solana has Stake-Weighted Quality of Service ("SWQoS"), which provides validators with stake privileged connections to the current leader to send transactions. When a validator is leading, it allocates a portion of its bandwidth specifically for these stake-weighted connections, ensuring transactions from staked validators are received and (potentially) processed. This combined mechanism leads to higher earnings (both transaction fees and priority fees) for validators with more stake and theoretically to centralization of stake.

In addition to base fees, users can attach an optional (albeit often necessary) priority fee to have their transactions processed faster during times of congestion. With the surge of network activity, priority fees have become a significant revenue source for validators. These tips historically were split 50/50 between being burned and given to the validator, but this changed with a SIMD-96 to reward 100% to the validator. We expect the best validators to only keep a portion of the reward, passing most of the priority fee to stakers.

Out-of-Protocol Tips

Most Solana validators participate in off-chain blockspace auctions via the Jito-Solana client. As of January 2025, 92% of stake-weight is running the Jito client to capture MEV.

Jito developed a parallel auction mechanism on Solana where users bid “tips” in order to secure additional transaction inclusion guarantees. In simple terms, it implements an auction system for transaction ordering.

The system enables searchers to submit transaction bundles (with profitable arbitrage or liquidation opportunities) with tips to the Jito Block Engine. Jito selects the highest bidder's bundle to include. Slot leaders allow Jito's block engine to decide on which bundle should be added to the top of the block - in a guaranteed order. The tip from the searcher is paid to the slot leader, who keeps a portion (commission) while the remainder is distributed to stakers as a reward. Recently, the TipRouter Node Consensus Network (NCN) went live, programmatically handling the distribution of Jito tips. TipRouter takes a flat 3% fee on all tips distributed. Concurrently to the implementation of TipRouter, Jito Labs reduced its block builder fee from 5% to 3%, meaning that the aggregate fee placed on Jito tips is now 6%.

Jito tips had grown to become a major revenue stream throughout the past year, accounting for about 20–30% of total validator rewards by year-end. Since then, they have decreased to only account for 14% over the past month.

Rewards

As of January 2025, issuance makes up the largest portion of validator rewards, with the net issuance rate for the month of January being 1.81M SOL (approximately $389.9M at current prices), and the gross issuance rate being 2.36M SOL ($517.5M). In contrast base fees make up the smallest portion of rewards that validators get (given that Solana base fees are quite low). In January 2025, base fees across Solana amounted to 17.3K SOL (approximately $3.1M USD), while priority fees were 1.03M SOL (~$184M) and Jito tips were 1.29M SOL (~$230.8M). However, since then, issuance has once again increased in dominance for validator rewards, currently making up 76% (previously 55%) , while Jito tips make up 14% (previously 30%) and priority fees make up 9% (previously 24%).

Operating Costs

Running a Solana validator is hardware and bandwidth-intensive. Typical hardware (bare-metal servers) costs $350–700 per month for the recommended specs (high-performance CPU, ample RAM/SSD, and high-speed connectivity). 

However, the most expensive part of running a Solana validator are the voting fees - which are a significant recurring expense. On Solana, every validator must continuously vote on confirmed blocks, paying 0.000005 SOL per vote. With ~216k slots per day, this can total up to ~1.08 SOL per day in vote fees (about 30–33 SOL per month, i.e. approximately $5K at current prices). Due to the high voting costs, validators need a substantial stake to break even.

Client Diversity

A common criticism of Solana has historically been due to the lack of diversity in validator clients. However, over the past two years, Solana has rapidly become a multi-client network. As of date, there are four relevant validator clients on Solana. For context, there are 8 relevant execution clients on Ethereum, with the vast majority using geth (51.35%), Nethermind (23.97%), Besu (9.62%), erigon (8.11%) and reth (6.56%), and 7 relevant consensus clients. Validators need to run one client for consensus and one for execution.

Agave (Solana Labs/Anza Client)

Agave is the original Solana validator client written in Rust, which is now maintained by the Anza team (former Solana Labs core engineers). Agave is the baseline client that implements Solana’s latest protocol features. In late 2024, Agave 2.0 was rolled out. Additionally, with Agave 2.1 and SIMD-96, 100% of priority fees are being directed to the block-producing validators.

Agave continues to be open-source and is the reference implementation. It powers the majority of non-Jito validators and is often used for RPC nodes as well. Agave focuses mostly on core consensus and performance upgrades like QUIC, fee markets, and more. The network’s stability improvements through 2024 can be partly attributed to continuous enhancements in the Agave/Labs client – e.g., the introduction of stake-weighted QoS to prioritize traffic from well-staked nodes, which helped prevent gossip network flooding.

Jito-Solana: 

Jito is a custom client (also Rust-based, forked from the main code) built by Jito Labs, tailored for MEV. It integrates an off-chain auction where searchers submit bundles with tips to the leader. As discussed, Jito-Solana has been widely adopted – over 90% of stake as of January 2025 is running on Jito for the leader functionality (as Jito-running validators earn considerably more due to out-of-protocol tips). The Jito client still participates in normal consensus, meaning there’s no change in the network rules - only changes to how leaders fill blocks (auction vs mempool ordering). Jito’s client has significantly boosted validator revenue. However, given that more than 90% of stake runs the Jito Client, there is the potential that a supermajority of validators (67%) might struggle if there’s a bug or issue with the client. 

Jito’s bundle system can improve network performance by reducing spam and failed arbitrage attempts (since MEV is resolved off-chain). It was reported that a large fraction of compute was wasted on failed arbitrage transactions before – Jito helps mitigate that. This can indirectly improve network throughput and finality times.

Firedancer (Jump Crypto’s C++ client): 

Firedancer is a new implementation of Solana in C/C++ by Jump Crypto’s team. It promises massive performance improvements and true client redundancy. An early version called “Frankendancer” (a hybrid using Firedancer's processing engine with the rust validator's networking stack) was unveiled. In testnet environments, Firedancer has shown that it can reach up to 600k – 1 million TPS in a lab setting with their optimized code, far beyond the ~5-10k TPS seen on mainnet. The Firedancer architecture is highly parallel and optimized for modern multi-core processors, using a tile-based pipeline (each core doing specific tasks in parallel) - aiming to reduce consensus overhead and latency.

As Firedancer goes live as a voting, block-producing client (planned mainnet launch is in late 2025), Solana will have at least two distinct codebases (Rust and C++) – if one client crashes, the other can keep the network alive.  Firedancer represents one of the first genuinely distinct validator client implementations (as Jito, while specialized for MEV, remains a fork). Having multiple independent codebases eliminates the risk of a single implementation becoming a bottleneck or centralized control point.

LSTs

More than 90% of the SOL staked is staked natively, while 8-9% of SOL staked is staked with liquid staking providers. This is a stark difference to Ethereum, where since there is no in-protocol delegation for stake, most users stake with liquid staking providers.

There are three major liquid staking protocols on Solana:

• Marinade
• Jito
• Sanctum

Between these, Jito is the dominant liquid staking protocol, with approximately 17M SOL liquid staked through them. Sanctum is second with 7.4M SOL, and Marinade is third with approximately 5M SOL liquid staked through them.

Marinade Finance (mSOL)

Marinade Finance is the first and second-largest liquid staking protocol on Solana, launched in 2021. Users can deposit SOL and receive mSOL, a token representing staked SOL in Marinade’s non-custodial pool. The protocol stakes SOL across a broad set of independent validators, through the Stake Auction Marketplace.

In particular, Marinade aims to promote validator decentralization by spreading stake beyond the supermajority (the largest validators). 

Marinade has also introduced a new product called Marinade Native for decentralized native staking. Marinate Native allows anyone to access an automated validator designation strategy, which allows holders of SOL/locked SOL to optimize their staking yield, without staking with one single validator and without giving up custody of their SOL. In addition, it comes with no smart contract risk.

Lastly, the protocol also introduced the Stake Auction Marketplace, which allows validators to compete by offering part of their rewards (like priority fee revenue) to mSOL and Native stakers. Historically, Marinade rewards (as a result of SAM) have been market-leading.

Stake Auction Marketplace (SAM)

In June 2024, Marinade Finance launched the Stake Auction Marketplace (SAM), which is a market-driven approach to validator delegation.

Marinade’s SAM is an onchain auction where validators submit bids indicating what APY (annualized yield) they commit to deliver to Marinade (mSOL and Native) delegators. Validators that bid higher yields will, if they win, receive more of Marinade’s SOL delegation until either their bid amount of stake is filled or they are outbid. Bids are essentially a promise of a commission rebate or bonus – since all validators earn roughly the same base rewards on a given amount of stake, the only way to offer a higher APY to delegators is to take less for themselves (i.e. lower commission, or even subsidize rewards). In practice, a bid can be thought of as a negative commission: a validator might say “I’ll give stakers the equivalent of 110% of normal rewards,” which means the validator is likely foregoing all commission and also kicking in extra from MEV earnings or other sources to hit that target.

Marinade periodically runs these auctions, and stake is redistributed according to the results. Importantly, this is permissionless and open – any validator can bid, including those outside Marinade’s prior delegation set.

The early results of SAM saw high APY bids from some validators. As of epoch 717 (late 2024), Marinade reported that typical top bids were far above normal staking yields: the winning bid APY was 13.73%, and the top ten bids ranged up to 18.27% APY. This is striking, given that a validator with 0% commission and standard MEV might only achieve ~9–10% APY for stakers. Bids in the mid-teens suggest that validators are willing to operate at a loss in protocol terms to gain Marinade stake. For context, if inflation plus average MEV is ~7-8%, offering 13% means the validator is likely paying an extra 5-6 percentage points of yield out of pocket or from other revenue.

This could be for a variety of reasons, including:

• Validators might choose to run unprofitably for a while to accumulate a large stake, hoping to attract organic delegations or to profit if MEV spikes in the future.
• Validators that may be engaging in extractive MEV can afford to pay out higher yields because they earn so much from those practices. Marinade has address concerns with regard to validators engaging in extractive MEV here.

Validators who win in SAM get a big influx of stake from Marinade’s pool. This increases their total rewards (since they have more stake), but because they’ve pledged most of it back to delegators, their net profit might be slim or negative.

For Marinade’s mSOL and Native holders, SAM could be attractive in terms of pure yield. If Marinade can deliver ~2-3% higher APY than competitors, mSOL becomes very attractive to hold. It also potentially increases mSOL’s market share, since yield-seeking stakers might switch from other LSTs or direct staking to mSOL to get that extra APY. However, there is a risk: if the high bids are not sustainable, those validators could eventually drop out, and Marinade might need to redistribute stake again, possibly causing some churn or slightly lower reliability if a winning validator was pushing their hardware too hard, for example. Marinade has put practices in place to reduce potential risks with high-bid validators; such as the proposal to form a delegation oversight committee to review and potentially blacklist malicious actors and even slash their bond (Marinade requires a small bond from validators) if they are proven to behave maliciously.

Jito

Jito is a relatively newer entrant (mainnet launch in late 2022) that has since then quickly rose to dominance by offering higher yields through MEV integration. As of February 2025, Jito’s jitoSOL is the largest LST on Solana, with about 35% market share and a market cap of roughly $2 billion. Jito’s value proposition is maximizing staking returns by capturing MEV and priority fees. The jitoSOL yield comes from normal inflation plus 94% MEV rebate – Jito passes MEV tips to stakers after taking its 6% fee (the Tip Router takes 3% and Jito Labs takes another 3%). Essentially, Jito’s stake pool requires validators in its set to run the Jito-Solana client and share the MEV earned. As a result, Jito’s APY has been slightly higher than vanilla staking.

Apart from JitoSOL, Jito also offers StakeNet, which extends Jito’s involvement in the Solana staking landscape by providing a specialized stake pool manager that helps delegators distribute stake with precision and transparency. StakeNet is composed of two onchain programs: the Validator History Program (VHP), which stores three years of verified validator data (covering onchain metrics and offchain attributes like hardware or geographic distribution), and the Steward Program (SP), which uses that data to calculate scores and automatically assign stake.

StakeNet focuses on decentralization and performance-driven delegation. By pulling in validator data—ranging from uptime to location—StakeNet provides a rules-based framework that can be customized according to specific needs or governance votes. Large delegators, such as liquid staking providers, can configure their own weighting for performance versus diversity, then let StakeNet systematically delegate stake to validators that meet those criteria. This process not only incentivizes validators to maintain high uptime and best practices to improve their scores, but also reduces the risk of excessive stake centralization by ensuring a more even distribution. Although it is a Jito product, StakeNet is intended for use by anyone seeking an efficient stake management system.

Sanctum

Sanctum offers two products:

• Infinity Pool, a multi-asset hub providing liquidity for LSTs and SOL.
• Automated LST creation, which automates LST creation for validators, aiming to streamline both liquidity for validator LSTs and increase validator participation.

Their flagship product is Infinity Pool, which holds any number of LSTs and SOL in a single collective pool. Users can deposit SOL to mint INF, a composite token representing a basket of staked SOL across various validators. The INF token earns rewards from both the underlying staking yield and the trading fees generated by swaps among LSTs. Beyond the Infinity Pool, Sanctum provides Automated LSTs, which create individual liquid staking tokens for every validator, allowing even small operators to tap into liquid staking without custom programming. 

Sanctum differs from Jito and Marinade in that its automated LST creation product is validator-centric. It automatically generates a unique LST for every Solana validator, allowing operators to directly compete for delegations. This system removes the dependence on high-level protocols like Marinade or Jito to secure liquid stake, allowing smaller validators to attract stake by branding and promoting their own token. Validators can opt to share additional rewards or fees with their token holders, offering higher APYs and increasing their token’s appeal. For example, following the diversion of 100% of priority fees to validators, we saw validators such as Helius start to give back a portion of these fees to their Sanctum LST holders.

Governance Proposals (SIMD-96, SIMD-123, SIMD-228)

Priority Fees Growth

Solana’s base fees are minimal, so priority fees (tips) have become the main mechanism users can use to bid for faster inclusion during high demand. With the surge in onchain activity in late 2023 and 2024 (e.g. during memecoin trading frenzies), average fees paid by users increased substantially. Importantly, Solana’s design of localized fee markets means not all transactions pay high fees – many still pay the base rate if not competing for the same hotspots – so median fees stayed low. 

But those engaged in intensive trading activity have started paying significant priority fees, creating a growing stream of income for block producers. By January 2025, the total monthly fee revenue (priority + base fees + tips) reached an all-time high of $551.7M. 

This general trend of fee surges on Solana has made the chain the leader in REV (fees + tips generated. For validators, this means there is much more value to capture beyond just inflation. A busy Solana epoch now yields meaningful SOL from fees – as one example, a validator earned ~13.59 SOL in fees in a single epoch, and across a year fees can contribute hundreds of SOL to a moderately active validator. However, high priority fees increase validator profitability only if the protocol lets them keep it - which leads to SIMD-96.

SIMD-96

Until February 2025, when users paid a priority fee (tip) on Solana, only half of that fee went to the block-producing validator; the other half was burned and permanently removed from the supply. This mechanism was originally intended to reward all SOL holders indirectly (via deflation) while limiting validator revenue. However, it also introduced an inefficiency: half of a user’s tip did not actually incentivize the validator, since it disappeared through burning. This gap encouraged potential off-chain “side deals,” where users and validators could bypass the 50% burn entirely.

SIMD-96 addressed the issue by directing 100% of priority fees to validators, effectively ending the burn on that portion of fees (though 50% of base fees remain burned). Approved in May 2024 and activated on Mainnet on February 12, 2025, it led to a drop in daily SOL burned—priority fees made up roughly 98% of transaction fees—leading to less deflation and a higher measured inflation rate (from about 3.6% to 4.7%). For validators, revenue from fees increased, but delegators saw little direct benefit unless their validator chose to distribute the additional fee income.

Previously, if a validator needed 5 SOL to justify including a transaction, a user had to pay a 10 SOL tip (half burned, half paid to the validator). Now, the user can simply pay 5 SOL for the validator to earn the same 5 SOL. While this can lower overall fees for users and dissuade under-the-table arrangements, it also reduces overall SOL burn—expanding the supply and raising questions about how best to share these newfound fee revenues with stakers.

SIMD-123

Today, delegators only automatically share in inflation rewards, while unburned transaction fees flow solely to the validator’s account. SIMD-123 proposes folding fee revenue into the existing staking reward distribution mechanism. If, for instance, a validator earned 10 SOL in fees and had a 10% commission rate, 1 SOL would go to the validator and 9 SOL would go to delegators.

By extending the same commission logic that applies to inflation rewards, this change would let delegators benefit directly from higher network fees. It also reduces the temptation for delegators to flock solely to validators with large stake weights, because over time, block production (and therefore fee generation) is proportional to stake. By aligning fee-sharing with the existing staking model, SIMD-123 effectively complements SIMD-96: after switching off the burn on priority fees, this ensures those fees don’t remain exclusively with validators but instead flow through to all stakers.

In the interim, some validators have begun distributing fees through off-chain mechanisms (like Jito’s TipRouter or Marinade’s SAM). While this approach achieves a similar result in the short run, it adds an external layer that takes a portion of the revenue (e.g.,TipRouter would take 3% of priority fees distributed). Many observers contend that a fully on-chain protocol solution is more transparent, simpler for delegators, and less prone to conflicts of interest.

SIMD-228

Whereas SIMD-96 and SIMD-123 focus on how fees are handled, SIMD-228 addresses Solana’s overall token issuance rate. Currently, Solana follows a fixed schedule that gradually declines to a terminal 1.5% inflation. However, with more users paying fees (and fewer tokens being burned after SIMD-96), some believe the nominal inflation rate should adapt more flexibly to the network’s real security needs.

The original SIMD-228 proposal (drafted by Multicoin’s Jain and Kankani) introduced a dynamic model in which the protocol tracks the percentage of total SOL staked. If that ratio exceeds a designated threshold (initially suggested as 50%), issuance drops to limit dilution. Conversely, if network stake participation falls below 50%, issuance rises to encourage more staking. In several scenario analyses:

• If stakers remain unresponsive to changing yields, inflation could drop to near-zero quite quickly (because no one is unstaking even as inflation falls).
• If stakers are very yield-sensitive and would rapidly unstake when rewards decline, inflation would stabilize at a moderate level, striking a balance between security and dilution.

Ultimately, this ties issuance more closely to the actual level of stakeholder commitment to the network, avoiding both overpaying for security (via high inflation) and underpaying for security (risking a low-stake environment).

Max Resnick of Anza proposed modifying the issuance rate formula proposed by Jain and Kankani in favor of a curve that addressed security considerations better, which, after community feedback, was accepted and added to the proposal. The new emission mechanism is a static curve that reduces the total issuance by a factor of the square root of the staking participation rate.

The chart below shows the new issuance curve proposed by SIMD 228 with the current inflation rate of 4.6%. Considering the current staking ratio of ~62.5%, the new annualized issuance rate would drop to 0.96%. To note, SIMD 228 proposes smoothing the transition from the old static issuance schedule to this new schedule by interpolating between the old issuance rate and the new issuance rate over 50 epochs.

SIMD-228 Arguments

In favor of SIMD 228 (Multicoin, Max Resnick):

• Core argument: Solana is currently overpaying for security, and an arbitrary fixed emission schedule will always be over- or underpaying for economic security. The most efficient token issuance is the lowest rate necessary to secure the network. The fixed emission schedule made sense when Solana was a nascent ecosystem with no Real Economic Value (REV). Back then, it was necessary to rely on token emissions to attract stake and guarantee security. However, given the current level of economic activity and fees (REV) on the network, the fixed emission schedule has become suboptimal because it emits more SOL than is necessary to secure the network today. You can talk about the "leaky bucket" problem here, which Resnick defines as the cost due to taxes or middlemen with market power (e.g., validators like Coinbase or Binance that charge high commissions).
• Nominal vs. Real Yields: SOL issuance is an accounting trick that only dilutes naked SOL holders and leads to artificially higher yields, incentivizing indiscriminate staking without distinguishing between nominal (issuance-based) vs. real (REV-based) rates. As Solana matures, the network should become economically sustainable and run purely on fees, which reflect the true economic demand to transact on the network. Markets are the best mechanism to determine prices, and Solana's emissions should not be the exception. SIMD 228 represents a significant improvement over the current fixed emission schedule.

 

Against SIMD 228 (the main voice here has been Lily Liu):

• **SOL inflation subsidizes institutional distribution. **While it's true that token holders should care only about real yield, custodians and ETP issuers are the opposite. They are incentivized to have the highest possible nominal yield since they take a commission rate on nominal yield. Think of a staked SOL ETP in Europe. The ETP issuer takes a % of staking rewards and doesn't have exposure to the underlying (SOL). Hence, high nominal incentivizes these players to sell SOL products to their clients, to increase their own top line. Thus, from this point of view, what Resnick calls a "leaky bucket" is actually a distribution spend. This is the strongest argument against SIMD 228, in my opinion.
• Institutional appeal: This is related to the point above. Changing the fixed emission schedule at a time of peak institutional interest and before Solana ETFs go live (potentially this year) is a strategic mistake. Liu's core argument is that inflation becomes unpredictable and unstable under the market-based approach, reducing the attractiveness of SOL as an asset. The rebuttal of this argument is that SOL is too volatile an asset to buy because of its 7-8% yield, and someone who stops buying SOL because of a drop in nominal yield didn't understand the asset in the first place.
• **Impact on validator profitability / reduced validator count: **As mentioned fees are the most significant expense for validators. There are valid concerns regarding the effect that SIMD 228 could have on the profitability of small validators, particularly in the case where network activity and REV drop from current levels. In other words, the SIMD-228 inflation curve will likely lead to a contraction in the validator set, though this effect is expected to be limited by some estimates (3.4% according to Helius under a high stake rate 70% scenario).

Conclusion

The Solana validator landscape has changed drastically over the past year. The chain now has 1,332 active validators with 380.9 million SOL staked (63.9% of supply) as of March 2025. Validator revenue has diversified beyond inflationary rewards to include Jito tips (14%), priority fees (9%), and base fees, especially with the increased activity on Solana. In January, with heightened onchain activity, we saw inflationary rewards shrink to make up only 55% of rewards, while Jito tips made up 30% and priority fees made up 24%. There has been a strong shift towards non-inflationary revenue sources, which have become more central to validator economics as priority fees and off-chain blockspace auctions gain traction. Client diversity has also improved drastically, with implementations such as Agave, Jito-Solana, and Frankendancer already in use, and upcoming clients like Firedancer and Sig expected to further strengthen resilience and reduce reliance on a single codebase.

Key governance proposals—SIMD-96, SIMD-123, and SIMD-228—will shape Solana validator rewards and inflation ecosystem. SIMD-96 redirects 100% of priority fees to validators, whereas SIMD-123 proposes commission-based sharing of those fees with delegators. SIMD-228 replaces the fixed emission schedule with a model tied to staking participation rates, potentially reducing inflation from the current 4.6% to around 0.96%. Meanwhile, roughly 9–10% of staked SOL flows through liquid staking protocols such as Jito, Marinade, and Sanctum—still lower than Ethereum’s LST adoption rate. In general, the network is maturing and transitioning toward fee-driven validator incentives and more refined economic mechanisms, seeking to balance not overpaying for economic security, while ensuring the validator set is diversified.

*This research report has been funded by Marinade Labs. By providing this disclosure, we aim to ensure that the research reported in this document is conducted with objectivity and transparency. Blockworks Research makes the following disclosures: 1) Research Funding: The research reported in this document has been funded by Marinade Labs. The sponsor may have input on the content of the report, but Blockworks Research maintains editorial control over the final report to retain data accuracy and objectivity. All published reports by Blockworks Research are reviewed by internal independent parties to prevent bias. 2) Researchers submit financial conflict of interest (FCOI) disclosures on a monthly basis that are reviewed by appropriate internal parties. Readers are advised to conduct their own independent research and seek the advice of a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions. *