Staking Pool Delegation Strategy

At the core of our mission is a commitment to Solana’s decentralisation, transparency, and resilience. Our delegation strategy is designed to support high-quality validators from underrepresented regions and emerging networks maintaining strict operational and ethical standards.

Strategy Objectives

• Empower diversity: Direct stake to validators from underrepresented regions and non-mainstream infrastructure setups.

• Promote operational excellence: Support validators with strong uptime, up-to-date software, and responsible behaviour.

• Help under-performing (ineligible) validators improve: On a case-by-case basis, help validators that did not qualify for the pool stake due to low uptime or other factors, with the Stardust Academy community good program.

Validator Eligibility

To be eligible for delegation from our pool, a validator must pass every check below. A validator that fails any one of them is excluded, whatever its score.

• Not be delinquent

• Be based outside of OFAC-sanctioned countries (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria), Russia and Belarus

• Maintain a commission rate no higher than 5%

• Operate Jito MEV

• Run a client version within the Solana Foundation's current required range

• Have total stake in the range of 50K - 250K SOL

• Have a skip rate of 10% or lower and a vote success rate of 90% or higher

• Have a verifiable location (hosting provider, country and city all known)

• Be hosted on a provider (ASN) holding less than 25% of network stake, and in a data centre holding no more than 15%, in line with the Solana Foundation's delegation criteria

• Not be flagged for malicious behaviour (such as sandwich attacks) by public validator moderators

The validators are ranked against the Scoring Criteria below.

Stake Distribution

Base Stake (50%)

Half of the total pool stake is equally distributed across all eligible validators.

Weighted Stake (Remaining 50%)

The other half is distributed based on a scoring system, rewarding decentralisation and excellence.

Scoring Criteria

Every eligible validator receives a score from 0 to 100, built from five weighted categories, plus an ESG bonus on top. Concentration tiers are recalculated from live network data at every run, so the scoring adjusts automatically as stake moves around the network.

Geographic diversity (by the country's share of network stake):

• Under 1%: 100 points

• 1 - 3%: 75 points

• 3 - 7%: 50 points

• 7 - 15%: 25 points

• 15% or more: 0 points

Infrastructure diversity (by the hosting provider's share of network stake):

• Under 1%: 100 points

• 1 - 5%: 75 points

• 5 - 10%: 50 points

• 10 - 25%: 20 points

Client diversity is a sliding scale: a client family with 0% of network stake scores 100 points, falling in a straight line to 0 points at 66%, the level at which a single client could finalise conflicting blocks on its own.

ESG bonus (added on top of the 0 - 100 score):

• +10: Data centre verified as running on 100% renewable energy

• +5: Partial renewable commitments, or located on a high-renewable grid

• +0: No published sustainability data

Tiebreaker: when two validators have the same score, the one in the less concentrated country and hosting provider ranks higher.

We also cap stake per validator, ensuring no single entity grows disproportionately regardless of their score.

We review the scoring model monthly and reserve the right to adjust.

Rebalancing & Automation

• Delegation is recalculated every two weeks, following next Wednesday epoch.

• A mix of on-chain and off-chain tools track performance and behaviour metrics.

• Stake is adjusted based on updated validator scores.

Treasury & Liquidity

The pool retains a 10% treasury reserve to manage token liquidity. This is rebalanced independently of the validator stake every epoch.