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Earn 7.0% APY staking with Solana Compass
Help decentralize and secure the Solana network delegating your stake to us and earn an impressive 7.0% APY yield on your SOL, while supporting us to create new guides and tools.
How Much Do Solana Validators Make?
Curious about how Validators work on Solana?
How much do validators make?
With over a thousand Solana validators operating at present there is a huge range in earnings, with many of the validators running at a loss, while some of the largest could be making profits in the millions each year from delegators staking their solana.
Aside from hosting costs - which can run to the tens of thousands of dollars annually - Solana validators must pay to be eligible to vote. This means a fixed cost of roughly 3 SOL every epoch (2-3 days), which at the time of writing equals costs of ~$150 every single day.
In exchange, a validator earns revenue in two ways:
- Charging a commission on the rewards generated by the stakes they hold
- A smaller fee for the votes submitted as 'leader' - this is typically very small unless the validator also holds a lot of stake
Commissions can be set by the validator and for public validators they range between 0 and 10%. So as an example, the current Solana network rewards are around 8% of stake annually.
If a validator has 50,000 SOL in stake delegated to it across the network, then each year it would generate roughly 50000*.08= 4000 SOL
in rewards for its stakeholders. Rewards are paid every epoch, and there are roughly 134 epochs in the year.
Depending on the commission the validator charges, it could earn
- 4000 * .10 = 400 SOL annually at 10% commission
- 4000 * .08 = 320 SOL annually at 8 % commission
- 4000 * .05 = 200 SOL annually at 5% commission
Yet in the same period it would need to pay 134*3 = 402 SOL to the network to be eligible to vote.
This means any validator with less than 50,000 in stake from other parties is running at a loss, and likely hoping to grow their delegated stake before it becomes unsustainable. Presently there are 132 validators losing money on the network out of 1,002 total validators
Of course this calculation doesn't account for the staked amount the validator actually owns, as they will receive 100% of the rewards. So while 50,000 SOL is the breakeven point for a validator charging 10% commission, a validator needs to own 'just' 5000 SOL staked to its own network to break even. At current rates that is still around $750k worth of SOL, which few of us have sat around waiting to invest.
Instead, most validators will need to focus on marketing their validator, just like any other business startup. If they can hustle to attract stake to their validator then they can build a sustainable business, but they must be prepared to spend SOL in the short term until their stake grows to a sustainable level.
Want to support a smaller validator? We're bootstrapping our own validator to support the Solana network here - delegate stake to us to earn a great APY, help us become sustainable and secure + decentralize the Solana network
On the flip side, the validators at the top of the list are earning handsomely. The top validation network by size of stake is Chorus One, which currently has roughly 15 million SOL staked to its validator and charges a fee of 8%.
From that number we can estimate they make a profit of $18 million per year, although this is likely ignoring the costs of their hosting infrastructure, dev ops staff and other costs that come with scale, as well as over simplifying: SOL may be worth $180 today, but for most of the year the price of the coin - and the amount staked on the network - has been considerably lower.
On this page
- Bridge From Ethereum To Solana To Buy Bonk
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- Breakpoint 2023: A Framework for On-Chain Gaming
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- Breakpoint 2023: A World in a Grain of Sand: State Compression on Solana
- Breakpoint 2023: Account Abstraction on Solana
- Breakpoint 2023: An Inside Look into the Past and Future of Solana Security
- Breakpoint 2023: Auditor's Panel
- Breakpoint 2023: Back to The Future: What Bugs You Can Expect in Your Project
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- Breakpoint 2023: Building a Creator Community
- Breakpoint 2023: Building Beyond Product
- Breakpoint 2023: Building Blocks of a Regenerative Economy
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- Breakpoint 2023: Burn-and-Mint Goldilocks Tokenomics for DePIN
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- Breakpoint 2023: DeFi/Insti Panel Discussion Highlights
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- Breakpoint 2023: Designing a Great User Experience for Mobile
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- Breakpoint 2023: Web3 Social Won't Sell You Socks
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- Breakpoint 2023: Winners of the Hyperdrive Hackathon
- Breakpoint 2023: Youth in Web3
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- MarginFi
- Marinade Finance
- Our Validator
- Liquidity Pools
- Token Swaps & Trading
- Yield Farming
- Solana Explained
- Is Solana an Ethereum killer?
- Transaction Fees
- Why Is Solana Going Up?
- Solana's History
- What makes Solana Unique?
- What Is Solana?
- How To Buy Solana
- Solana's Best Projects: Dapps, Defi & NFTs
- Choosing The Best Solana Validator
- Staking Rewards Calculator
- Liquid Staking
- Can You Mine Solana?
- Solana Staking Pools
- Staking On Solana
- How To Unstake Solana
- How To Unstake Solana
- How validators earn
- Best Wallets For Solana