🚀 Delegation onboarding guide
What a newly approved validator needs to know: how stake reaches you, what it costs, and how to keep receiving it.
You passed the Validator Board review and joined the approved list. This page covers how stake from The Vault reaches you, the fees on it, and what keeps it flowing.
You don't need to do anything to start: the stakebot includes you automatically and updates allocations every three hours.
How you receive stake
The Vault splits its undirected stake three ways, and you can receive stake from all three at the same time (Figure 8.4).
| Program | Share | How you qualify |
|---|---|---|
| Gauges | 10% | Lock $V and vote, or buy votes on Votex. Stake follows your share of the votes in each weekly voting epoch. |
| Direct Stake Leaders bucket | 40% | Be among the top 100 validators by total direct stake through The Vault, from vSOL or Kamino Multiply. The top 100 share equally. |
| Elite Performance bucket | 50% | Be among the top 50 approved validators with 0% base and 0% MEV commission, ranked by vote credits. |
Figure 8.4: How undirected stake is allocated
Direct stake to your own validator counts, and so does vSOL your community directs to you. External self stake outside The Vault does not. The leaderboards are posted in The Vault Discord and updated daily at midnight UTC: Direct Stake Leaders top 50 and bottom 50, and Elite Performance.
Stake-as-a-Service fees
Stake you receive from the Direct Stake Leaders and Elite Performance buckets carries a Stake-as-a-Service fee of 25% of the earnings on that stake. Your own stake, vSOL, Kamino positions and gauge stake are not charged.
An invoice is issued every epoch, one epoch after you receive the stake. Pay it in vSOL or SOL on the validator dashboard: click your validator, connect your wallet and pay. To pay automatically, set up the SaaS payment bot, which pays your outstanding invoices once a day (Pay your fees automatically).
If an invoice stays unpaid for 20 epochs, the stakebot blocks delegation to your validator from the Direct Stake Leaders and Elite Performance buckets until your invoices are settled (Figure 8.5). You stay on the approved list.
Figure 8.5: When invoices block delegation
Staying approved
To keep receiving stake from the buckets, keep meeting these requirements. Falling short can lead to temporary removal and re-evaluation by the Validator Board.
- Good actor: no sandwiching or harmful MEV.
- Base commission of at most 5%.
- MEV commission of at most 10%.
- Uptime of at least 97.5%.
- A vote on every SIMD proposal.
Raising your commission above 5% or your MEV commission above 10% (the Solana Foundation Delegation Program criteria), even for one epoch, can block your stake for 10 epochs. For the full rules, see Approved list criteria.
What to expect
- Allocations update every three hours.
- A new allocation ramps up over several epochs, up to about five, because of Solana's warm-up rules and rebalancing. Announced targets are reached gradually.
- Gauge votes apply to the next voting epoch and last one week, so renew them every week.
- Your stake target, direct stake and invoices are on the validator dashboard and in the Validator Monitor app's The Vault tab.
First steps
- Check your direct stake total on the validator dashboard.
- Direct stake to your own validator, and invite your community to direct vSOL to you.
- Set 0% base and 0% MEV commission if you aim for the Elite Performance bucket.
- Consider gauges if they fit your strategy.
- Pay your invoices every epoch, or let the SaaS payment bot pay them.
Questions? Open a support ticket on The Vault Discord. Shares, thresholds and fees can change through governance decisions or strategy updates, and nothing here is investment advice.