Layer33, a collective of independent Solana validators, has asked the Solana Foundation to pause the weekly retirement of validators from its Delegation Program. In an open letter posted on X on 9 November 2026, the group argues that the program's new rules "work against decentralization" by removing experienced independent operators, and asks the Foundation to consult current members before the rules are finalized.
The Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP) lends Foundation-owned SOL to independent validators so they can earn rewards while they build a staker base of their own. Layer33's members are among the operators who stand to lose that stake. As we covered when the new SFDP rules took effect on 6 November, membership now runs for 12 months. SolanaFloor has described Layer33 as a group of 25 independent validators; the letter is signed "L33" and names no members.
Layer33's five requests to the Solana Foundation
The letter closes with five asks:
- Pause the weekly retirement tranches until the community has been consulted.
- Give members who took part in the Alpenglow community cluster at least six months of continued delegation on Alpenglow mainnet before any retirement takes effect.
- Publish the analysis behind what it calls "the arbitrary 100-validator cap, and twelve-month figures."
- Open a formal consultation with current SFDP members before the rules are finalized.
- Adopt a long-term "contributor model" that rewards uptime through upgrades, client diversity, network and geographic spread, and governance testing, with "inactivity means removal" as the exit rule.
What the new SFDP rules say, and where accounts differ
The Foundation's Delegation Program FAQ says "Membership lasts 12 months," and that members "retire when their stake from sources other than SFDP exceeds 300,000 SOL." Retired validators can apply for renewal through a Foundation form.
Two details are less settled. Layer33's letter describes "a hard cap of 100 validators" and the retirement of existing members in weekly tranches, and SolanaFloor's report of the letter uses the same terms. The FAQ's own wording on the number is that "100 new validators will be added to the stake bot at a time, each week," which reads as an onboarding batch. The weekly retirement schedule does not appear on the FAQ.
Layer33's case: Alpenglow costs, Teraswitch and the Nakamoto coefficient
The letter's sharpest argument concerns Alpenglow, the consensus upgrade that went live on mainnet on 21 October 2026. Layer33 says independent validators ran most of the community test cluster, paid for extra servers, sat through "dozens of regenesis's" and absorbed higher vote costs during weeks of faster block times. "Before most of us have earned back a fraction of what that period cost, SFDP is retiring us," the group writes.
Layer33 also points to the 12 August 2026 Teraswitch outage, when a routing failure at one hosting provider took a large share of stake offline and Solana kept running. The group credits SFDP's rule limiting how much stake can sit on one network provider. The Foundation made a similar point at the time: Foundation technology executive Jacob Creech was quoted by crypto.news saying that "validators in the Solana Foundation Delegation Program were unaffected."
The letter puts Solana's Nakamoto coefficient, the smallest number of operators whose combined stake could halt the network, at 8 when validators run by the same operator are grouped, and at 3 against a 20% safety threshold. Layer33 contrasts those figures with "the 18 or so that gets repeated in marketing," and says Alpenglow raised the liveness threshold from 33% to 40%.
Solana Compass measures the coefficient per validator rather than per operator, against a third of stake, so the two numbers measure different things. Our decentralization statistics put it at 18 at epoch 1082 on 9 November 2026, the same value in every epoch from 1033 to 1082.
Over those 50 epochs, the 10 largest validators' share of stake barely moved, from 24.5% at epoch 1033 in early August to 24.56% at epoch 1082. The validator count rose from 677 to 698, with about 436.3 million SOL actively staked at the latest epoch.
The letter further states that Layer33's "understanding" is that the Foundation intends to redirect stake toward institutional validators, and names Figment as an operator it expects to benefit. The letter offers no evidence for that, and we found no Foundation statement describing such a plan.
The Solana Foundation's case for retiring SFDP validators
The Foundation has framed the program as a starting point for new operators. Crypto Briefing's account of the changes describes the SFDP as "a launchpad, not a permanent home." In that account, keeping graduated validators in the program would "tie up Foundation stake that could instead support newer entrants," while retiring members gradually "avoids a sudden drop in stake for a large group of validators at once."
Creech defended that model in replies to critics after the rules took effect. "One of the goals of sfdp is to help these validators onboard," he wrote on 6 November. "If they want to sustain themselves for the long-term, there's already a lot of objective performance criteria to go after." Two days later he added that "technical performance is one part" and "if you want to succeed you must do more."
Neither the Solana Foundation's X account nor Creech had responded publicly to the Layer33 letter as of 21:30 UTC on 9 November 2026.
What to watch next for SFDP and Layer33
- Any Foundation response to the five requests, in particular the pause on weekly retirements.
- Whether the Foundation clarifies the 100 figure: a weekly onboarding batch or a limit on program size.
- How many validators leave in the first retirement tranches, and how many renewal applications succeed.
- Solana's validator count over the coming epochs, which stakers can follow on our validator list.
