Apply for whitelisting
If you run a validator and you believe you meet the criteria below, submit your details and we'll get back to you. Admission is gated by the hard thresholds + team-location requirement. After admission, the size of your delegation is determined each epoch by your composite rarity rank under the GDI methodology: operators in underrepresented countries, cities, and ASNs receive larger delegations than those in already-saturated buckets, but everyone admitted gets some stake.
Hard thresholds
Operational gates with concrete numbers. Each is verified against on-chain or public-API data; every rejection cites the specific rule.
- 1
Validator commission ≤ 5%. Exactly 5% is allowed; 5.01% rejects.
- 2
MEV commission ≤ 10% (1000 bps). Jito MEV commission cannot exceed this.
- 3
Actively voting on Solana mainnet — vote account live, not persistently delinquent (no more than 4 hours offline in any 7-day window).
- 4
Strong voting performance — Stakewiz `skip_rate` below 10% across recent epochs. Stricter than SFDP's `network_average + 5pp` rule. A persistent pattern of missed leader slots is degraded operational health, even if the validator never goes fully offline.
- 5
SFDP standing intact — not removed from the Solana Foundation Delegation Program for cause.
Mission alignment
Two distinct location signals — both required. Team location is about where the people doing the work are based; validator location is about where the box runs.
- 6
Team based in APAC. East Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong), Southeast Asia (Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, …), South Asia (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal), or Oceania (Australia, New Zealand). This is operator location — not corporate domicile, not hosting location.
What earns preference
Beyond the eligibility bar, this is what moves an application up the queue.
- 7
Verifiable, measurable contributions to the Solana ecosystem in your region. Shipped products, dev tooling, hackathons run, education or community work, audited contributions. Real outputs with public evidence, not stated intentions.
Submit your application
Have your validator's vote id, country, and an email / Telegram / X contact ready before you start.
Your information is kept private and confidential.
Questions? DM @realtielman on Telegram