New validators spring up as Solana usage surges

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Solana has seen frenzied trading activity over the past year, and arguably the biggest beneficiary has been the network’s validators.

Since November, validator revenue consistently netted at least $40 million every roughly two days, according to data from 21 co. That’s up from roughly $4 million every two days this time last year. A number of new validators have been springing up to enter the fray.

The small crypto research startup Kairos Research launched a Solana validator in partnership with node operator Firstset this week, which currently has around $3 million in delegated SOL. Solana validator hardware requirements are “an order of magnitude higher” than on other blockchains, Firstset told me, so the server providers it looked at were a bit more expensive than they would have been on Ethereum, for instance. 

Kairos also had to reckon with the higher hardware provider costs based on Solana’s higher throughput and the bit more than one SOL per day validators have to spend voting on blocks, which is how the network reaches consensus. 

The Solana Foundation initially covers voting costs for new validators, and it stakes its large stash of SOL with smaller validators. With the Solana Foundation’s help on voting costs, Kairos and Firstset’s validator currently costs around $1,400 per month to run and is already breaking even.

Validators earn revenue from SOL-denominated block rewards the network pays out as well as MEV and priority fees paid by users trying to land transactions. Validators set a commission on block rewards and MEV income, and they currently receive half of priority fees. Those who have more SOL staked have a better chance of receiving block rewards, so validator revenue increases with size.

Helius, the largest validator on the Solana network with more than 3% of the total stake, didn’t initially intend to get into the staking business at all. When stake-weighted quality of service — a newer feature that prioritizes network traffic based on stake and makes it easier for RPC nodes with validators to land transactions — went live on Solana, Helius changed course. 

“I was like, ‘Shit, we need a Solana validator now,’” Mumtaz recalled on a Lightspeed podcast episode . The hardware costs were negligible for Helius, since the company already ran a number of nodes, and it quickly began attracting stake after launching in May 2024 due to Mumtaz’ brand and the high APY it passed onto stakers. 

Larger enterprises have the option to go the acquisition route. Sol Strategies, a holding company focused on Solana, has acquired two validator operations. Its validator operations now net between 100 to 200 SOL during most epochs, a Solana time measurement which takes around two days. That’s tens of thousands every other day in revenue. 

Max Kaplan, who was once head of engineering at Kraken, started one of the staking companies Sol Strategies acquired, and he’s now the company’s head of staking.

“It’s very competitive now,” Kaplan said of the staking space. “You need to be good at system level optimizations [and/or business development] to really make it profitable.”

Kaplan still thinks new validators turning a profit is doable. Validators’ fortunes will partly depend on if Solana can maintain what has been an unprecedented level of usage over the past several months.

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