Solana Tightens Validator Funding Rules: Participation Term Set at 12 Months, Unplanned Staking Over 300,000 SOL to Automatically Exit

November 10 — Jacob Creech, Vice President of Technology at the Solana Foundation, responded to the controversy sparked by recent adjustments to the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP).

The adjustments include: setting the participation period for validators in SFDP at 12 months, automatic graduation after staking reaches 300,000 SOL, capping the number of validators at 100, and requiring participants to run their own validator nodes.

Jacob Creech stated that SFDP originally had three main tasks: helping new validators get started, establishing a healthy testnet, and allowing some validators to test network updates in advance. As the Solana ecosystem has expanded and the validator community has gradually matured, SFDP's original mechanisms have become insufficient to fully adapt to the network's evolving needs, so the foundation hopes to shift toward a more proactive and flexible delegation mechanism focused on supporting network health and ecosystem contributors.

SFDP will continue to support new validators, while the foundation will also reward validators who make important contributions to network health through delegation methods outside of SFDP. Previously, the foundation delegated stakes to ecosystem contributors such as Blueshift and also supported validators who were the first to test Frankendancer. In response to community concerns that the adjustments may lead to a reduction in the number of validators, Jacob Creech stated that reducing validators is not the goal of this adjustment, but if enough high-quality contributors cannot be found, a decline in validator numbers may become a side effect. He also revealed that more than 100 validators have submitted materials to apply for continued support.