Bitwise Staking Report: Solana Ends Q3 With 69% Staked, a 5.99% Gross Yield and 659 Validators

Bitwise's latest staking report says Solana SOL$105.95+1.7% ended the third quarter of 2026 with more of its supply staked, a lower yield on that stake and fewer validators. "Solana ended the quarter with 69% of supply staked at a 5.99% gross yield, down from 6.38%," write Kam Benbrik and Rafal Klich in The Bitwise Staking Report (Q4 2026), published on 20 October 2026. The same report says Solana's validator count "fell under cost pressure from 696 to 659, roughly 30% lower than a year ago." Bitwise covers five networks; on Ethereum it counts 35.9% of supply staked at a 2.63% yield.

Bitwise is a participant in Solana staking as well as an observer. It bought staking provider Chorus One in February 2026, The Block reported, and runs validators through its Bitwise Onchain Solutions unit. That Solana validator held about 10.9 million staked SOL on 20 October, fourth-largest in the Solana Compass validator rankings. It was fifth when we covered its August inflows.

What Solana Compass data shows on staked SOL and the validator count

Solana Compass's epoch data agrees with two of Bitwise's three Solana numbers. By our estimate, active stake was just under 70% of total SOL supply on 30 September, up from about 68% a year earlier. Over that year, validators with active stake fell from 958 on 14 October 2025 to 678 on 30 September 2026. That 29% drop matches Bitwise's "roughly 30%."

Our count runs 15 to 19 validators above Bitwise's: 711 against 696 at the end of June, and 678 against 659 at the end of September. Bitwise's report page does not say how it counts validators, and ours counts vote accounts with active stake, so the two series measure slightly different things. The quarterly fall is the same size in both.

Our epoch data also shows the shape of the decline. The Solana validator count fell fastest in late 2025, to about 800 by mid-December. From January through August it slid by about 14 a month on average. Since early September it has held between 671 and 685, and it stood at 677 on 20 October.

The smaller validator set holds slightly more concentrated stake. The Nakamoto coefficient is the smallest number of validators that together hold more than a third of stake. On our data it fell from 20 to 18 over the year, while the ten largest validators' share rose from 22.2% to 24.5%. Fidelity's research unit reached the same figure of 18 in its Solana network health report on 16 October.

Solana staking yield: Bitwise's 5.99% and the SOL inflation taper

Bitwise does not define "gross yield" on its report page or say which data it used. Solana Compass's own gross estimate divides newly issued SOL plus Jito JTO$0.472+7.5% tips by active stake, before validator commission. Because the methods differ, the two levels are not directly comparable. Both measures fell across the quarter and across the year. Our realised figure, the average stakers earned after commission, is the series behind our staking dashboard.

Most of the fall in our measure traces to issuance. In our estimate, new SOL made up about 97% of gross staking yield at the end of September, with Jito tips the rest. Solana's inflation schedule cuts the issuance rate by 15% a year. On the inflation data Solana Compass tracks, the scheduled rate went from 3.77% at the end of June to 3.62% at the end of September. That smaller issuance is shared across a larger staked share, the pattern Bitwise sums up as "Stake rose while yields fell." A faster taper, SIMD-0550, passed in the SGP-0002 governance vote but is not yet in effect. Our inflation data shows the rate Solana's RPC reports at epoch 1063 still uses the 15% taper.

Solana validator costs and Alpenglow's 0.8 SOL admission ticket

Bitwise names cost pressure as the reason Solana's validator set shrank, but its report page does not break those costs down. Voting is one of them. Validators pay a fee on every vote transaction: about 1 SOL a day at 400-millisecond slots and about 2 SOL a day at today's 200 milliseconds, according to Solana engineers at Galaxy Digital writing on 20 October. Galaxy, which runs the ninth-largest Solana validator by stake in our rankings, says Alpenglow is scheduled to activate at the start of epoch 1064 on 21 October. The consensus upgrade replaces vote fees with a flat Validator Admission Ticket of 0.8 SOL per epoch, "roughly 0.8 SOL a day, which is less than half of what validators pay to vote today," the Galaxy engineers wrote. Which validators were ready for the switch was the subject of our 19 October readiness report.

The quarter Bitwise measured ended three weeks before that scheduled switch, so its Solana figures describe validator economics under the old vote-fee model.