The Solana Foundation Delegation Program helps active developers and contributors within the Solana ecosystem become network validators.

Because these individuals and teams are already deeply familiar with the network's needs, they are ideal candidates for running a validator. They share the goal of improving Solana’s decentralization, reliability, and performance.

The program has three primary objectives:

1. Maximize decentralization, reliability, and performance of Solana
2. Maximize the number of validators who have diverse sources of stake
3. Sustain a large and representative testnet

The following components are designed to achieve these goals:

Testnet Participation

In order to receive support through the SFDP, participants must maintain their testnet node and keep acceptable performance (see Delegation Criteria) in at least 5 of the last 10 epochs to receive mainnet support and delegation.

Vote Cost Coverage

The SFDP will cover voting costs for validators in their first year of participating in the SFDP with a tapering amount over time. Starting from onboarding for the first three months participants will have 100% of vote costs covered, for the next three months 75%, for the third three months 50% and for the final three months 25%, with vote coverage ending after 12 months. For more details please see FAQ: Vote Cost coverage. This is only eligible for the first validator an organization or entity runs.

Why? Vote costs can be prohibitive to new, small validators and might discourage potential validators from even attempting to start a validator. Meanwhile, time bounding and tapering this support encourages validators to achieve sustainable stake levels before support ends.

Performance Requirements: Validators must meet the stake matching requirements (see Delegation Criteria) for the epoch to be eligible for vote cost coverage.

Stake Matching

The SFDP will partially match stake, or stake not from Solana Foundation.

By matching stake, the SFDP creates a strong incentive for participants to engage with the broader Solana community and attract stake external to the delegation program thereby increasing their independence and encouraging them to optimize their performance and decentralization metrics. Secondarily, this gives the broader Solana ecosystem an opportunity to influence where the Solana Foundation stakes its SOL by having their own delegations decisions matched by the Solana Foundation. For more information on stake matching, including matching limits and matching ratios, please see FAQ: Stake Matching

Examples, assuming a stake matching ratio of 0.5 and a matching limit of 50,000 SOL:

1. If an SFDP participant has 10,000 SOL stake outside of the SFDP, then they would get an additional 5,000 SOL delegation from the Foundation, for a total of 15,000 SOL plus the residual delegation. (see residual delegation below)
2. If an SFDP participant has 250,000 SOL staked excluding SFDP stake, then they would get 50,000 from the matching portion of SFDP, for a total of 300,000 SOL plus the residual delegation from the Foundation (see residual delegation below)

Performance Requirements: Validators must meet the residual requirements (see Delegation Criteria) and have a five epoch of average of sufficiently high block production.

Residual Delegation

Any residual SOL held by the Foundation that is committed to this program after all the stake matching delegations are made will be distributed evenly to eligible validators as long as they meet the residual performance requirements. This enables new validators to receive a sufficient amount of stake to get on the leader schedule and allow the participants to demonstrate sufficient block production performance needed to eventually receive a stake matching delegation.

Performance Requirements: Validators must meet the residual requirements (see Delegation Criteria) to receive residual delegation.