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Validators

How we choose where your stake goes.

Definity delegates across a curated set of validators — and the pool rebalances each epoch so that allocation stays current. Here's what we filter for.

Hard thresholds

Operational gates with concrete numbers. Each is read from a public on-chain or public-API source — every rejection cites the specific rule violated so you can verify it yourself.

  1. 01

    Validator commission ≤ 5%

    On-chain commission (from Solana RPC) cannot exceed 5%. Exactly 5% is allowed; 5.01% rejects.

  2. 02

    MEV commission ≤ 10%

    Jito MEV commission cannot exceed 1000 basis points. Exactly 10% is allowed; 10.01% rejects.

  3. 03

    Actively voting on mainnet

    Vote account must be live on Solana mainnet and not persistently delinquent — no more than 4 hours offline in any 7-day window.

  4. 04

    Strong voting performance

    Skip rate must remain below 10% across recent epochs (Stakewiz `skip_rate`). This is stricter than SFDP's `network_average + 5pp` rule — Definity is a curated pool, not a delegation program. A persistent pattern of missed leader slots is degraded operational health even if the validator never goes fully offline.

  5. 05

    SFDP standing intact

    Must not have been removed from the Solana Foundation Delegation Program for cause.

Mission alignment

About who runs the validator — not where the box runs. (Validator hosting location is not an admission requirement; it determines stake allocation post-admission. See “How we allocate stake” below.)

  1. 06

    Team based in APAC

    Where the people doing the work are physically located — Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and the rest of East/Southeast/South Asia + Oceania. This is operator location, not corporate domicile (FZCO / BVI / Cayman are common for tax — they don't affect this filter) and not hosting location. A Japan-based team running their node anywhere on the planet passes; a US-based team running their node in Tokyo does not.

What earns preference

07

Verifiable, measurable contributions

Above the eligibility bar, validator teams with visible, measurable work growing the Solana ecosystem in their region get preference. Shipped products, dev tooling, hackathons run, education or community work, audited contributions. Real outputs with public evidence, not stated intentions.

How we allocate stake

Admitted validators all receive some stake — but how much depends on where they run. Each epoch, pool stake is distributed across the admitted set in proportion to each validator's composite rarity on country, city, and ASN (measured live against the GDI methodology). A validator whose country and ASN are both underweight in the network earns the largest delegation. One whose location duplicates an already-saturated bucket receives the minimum but is still admitted.

This replaces a previous flat stake-per-validator approach. Flat was easy to reason about but didn't reward operators in places that need stake the most. Under the rarity-weighted strategy, an APAC operator running a node in an underweight city / ASN — Manila, Jakarta, Hong Kong outside the popular Chai Wan / Equinix clusters, a Bangalore datacenter that isn't shared upstream with a dozen other validators — receives meaningfully more stake than a seventh validator in Frankfurt on Hetzner or Tokyo on Allnodes.

Rebalancing happens gradually each epoch. No operator loses more than a small fraction of their delegation in any single epoch, giving teams time to migrate to better-positioned infrastructure if they choose to.

Operators — check where you stand

Look up your validator on the public GDI index to see your current composite rarity, network rank, and which dimensions (country, city, ASN) are dragging your score up or down. If you're in a saturated bucket and want a path back into the active delegation set, the index shows you which dimensions to change.

Open the GDI validator lookup

Continuous monitoring after admission

Approved validators stay in the active delegation set as long as they remain within the hard thresholds above. A separate compliance scan re-checks each validator on a regular cadence — commission, MEV commission, SFDP standing, delinquency, and Stakewiz curator flags. If a validator drifts out of compliance (e.g., raises commission above 5%, gets flagged for sandwiching), it is removed from the active delegation set with an alert to the operator.

Substance scoring (contributions, originality) is not re-evaluated after admission — only operational compliance. A validator admitted on a modest substance score is not at risk of removal as long as it stays within the published thresholds. Stake allocation, however, is recomputed every epoch from the live GDI index, so a validator that becomes more (or less) decentralised over time gets more (or less) stake on autopilot.

See the live delegation set

The list of currently-delegated validators is recorded on-chain in the pool account itself. The most accurate, up-to-the-epoch view is in Solscan.

View pool on Solscan

Run a validator? Apply to be whitelisted

If you operate a Solana validator and meet the criteria above, you can submit your details for review. Approved validators become eligible to receive stake from the pool.

Apply for whitelisting