Understanding Solana Validators

Validator Activation Timeline

Once it’s initiated, the validator becomes active after one epoch, which is roughly 2.5 days. This activation marks the beginning of your validator’s journey.

Validator Rewards

Solana validators earn rewards in two main ways:

• Inflation Rewards: Automatically distributed based on your validator’s stake.
• Leader Slot Transaction Fees: Earned during leader slots, covering transactions by other voters.

Validators incur daily expenses, averaging around 1.1 SOL for vote transaction fees (rent). To be self-sustaining, a validator needs sufficient delegation to cover these costs through transaction fees.

Vote Account

A vote account refers to one of two addresses that make up a validator. It is never needed to sign any transactions but is just used to look up account information. When someone wants to delegate tokens in a stake account, the delegation command is pointed at the vote account address of the validator to whom the token holder wants to delegate.

For validators using Jito MEV, the vote account optimizes transactions for maximum rewards.

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Blockdaemon supports Jito MEV

Our public validator is Jito-enabled so you can optimize earnings. If you prefer a private validator, the MEV fee will be set the same as the validator.

Get started here.

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