rplust

Response to the Foundation on SFDP changes We appreciate the Foundation responding publicly. Conversations at Breakpoint and Block Zero are valuable, but public discourse lets operators who cannot attend those events be heard too. And there is real agreement in the response, so let's start there. The response says Solana is much larger than when SFDP started, that the validator set has matured, and that the network faces challenges nobody conceived of at the beginning. We agree. We said the same thing in our letter. Solana is entering its next stage, and delegation should evolve with it. Where we part ways is what that evolution looks like. If the network has matured, the goalposts should move. Instead, SFDP is being redefined to complete its original goal again. That is not the next stage. It is the first stage on a loop, except the new rules boot the long-term contributors who are the output of the first stage and replace them with short-term 12 month tenants. The network trades operators who stayed for years for operators who are built to leave. It regressed, not progressed. Supporting new validators and supporting existing contributors are not mutually exclusive. A mature program does both. These rules prioritize only one group, and it is not the existing talent. First Principles The question is simple: Why does the new program value a brand new validator over one that has been operating reliably for three or more years? New validators will continue to receive stake. Validators who have run through every upgrade, every outage, and every cluster test since 2023 will lose it. We have read the announcement and the response several times and cannot construct the argument that makes the first group more valuable to network health than the second. If that argument exists, we would like to hear it. Alpenglow Community Cluster In follow-up comments, the Foundation said the Alpenglow community cluster participants provided crucial help, that they should be directly rewarded, and that these changes exist in part to make that possible. We welcome that. It is the first time the Foundation has said it. But it raises more questions than it answers. First, none of this was communicated with the initial announcement. The announcement said: you are out, the offboarding tranches start now. Only after independent validators pushed back publicly did the Foundation say contributors would be rewarded. And when asked how, the answer was opaque. Operators who ran the cluster at their own expense did not know until this week that they were about to lose their delegation, and still do not know whether they will get any of it back. Second, the Foundation says that with so much stake tied up in SFDP there was no way to reward the cluster participants. That is hard to accept. SFDP currently holds over 10 million SOL in residual. Rewarding a group of cluster participants materially would not have required dismantling the program as we know it. Third, the people the Foundation now says it wants to reward are the people being retired first. If the intent is to reward them, the sequence should be reward first, then restructure. Not retire, then promise. So if participating in the cluster is seen as valuable, will they be rewarded? Why does the retirement proceed before that is defined? "We reward contributors" is still not a program One of the responses says the intent is not to make running a validator a secondary activity, but to directly reward those improving network health. We agree with that framing entirely. It is close to word for word what our letter proposed. The response also says validators who contribute to network health should be rewarded, and points to past discretionary delegations to Blueshift and early Frankendancer operators as proof. We agree those were good decisions and believe discretionary delegations should continue to exist. But a handful of discretionary delegations is not a system. In addition, intent is not process. There are still no criteria, no application, and no timeline. Most contributors did not know discretionary delegation existed until this response. Now that they do, they have no idea how to access it or whether they qualify. "We staked to these guys before" is not an answer to "how do I survive on solana." Meanwhile contributors are shutting down nodes and cancelling Breakpoint trips because the only concrete thing they have been told is that their stake is leaving. This is not an argument against discretionary delegation. It is an argument for giving contributors something concrete to grasp to. Objective criteria show talented operators what the network values and can grow the contributor count. Discretionary delegation catches what the criteria miss. Both together work. Discretion alone asks everyone to trust a process they cannot see. On the feedback Asked to publish the feedback behind these changes, the Foundation pointed to a Discord channel where SFDP validators call out malicious or harmful operators. We know the channel. The people in it do real work. But that is not feedback on program design. It is validators reporting bad actors, and if the problem was bad actors, the obvious response was to bring those validators in and use their tools to remove the bad actors directly. Instead these changes aimed to retire the people doing the reporting along with the people they were reporting. There is a real chance good actors are now shut down for having spent their time calling out bad ones to improve the network. The changes themselves The response says SFDP was not reactive enough. On that, fair. The 1M SOL cap was badly outdated. But these changes do not trim fat. They cut into bone. The delegation cut: The validators who survive the retirement see their SFDP delegation drop from roughly 85k SOL to 55k. A 30k- 35k SOL cut is a severe hit for any independent validator, from any source. For many it is the difference between profitable and not. The twelve-month retirement: An automatic clock tells every operator in the program that they are a tenant with an eviction date. That is not how you retain the people you want. An annual review that renews contributors and removes the inactive would achieve the same accountability without the eviction notice. The 100-validator cap: If more than 100 operators meet the criteria, why turn them away? If fewer do, the cap is irrelevant. Either way it serves no purpose except to signal scarcity. Was any analysis done to arrive at 100? If so, can it be published? If the other changes are implemented, the program likely lands near that number on its own without needing to announce a ceiling. The timing: Breakpoint and Block Zero are days away. Independent validators who booked travel to attend are now being told they are no longer viable. Some even sponsored events. Some have cancelled their tickets. Some have already turned their validators off. Block Zero in particular is organized, hosted, attended, and sponsored by many of the validators now on the chopping block. At least one sponsor has said publicly that they would have reconsidered their sponsorship had they known they would be losing SFDP stake. These are exactly the people the network should be fighting to keep, and the Foundation chose the week before its own conference to tell them to leave. The communication problem underneath all of it Step back and look at the sequence. The announcement said: you are out, tranches start now. Nothing about rewarding contributors. Nothing about Alpenglow. Nothing about where the stake goes. After the community pushed back, the Foundation said contributors would be rewarded but could not say how. If the plan all along was to support contributors, that should have been the headline, with criteria attached. Instead the people affected have learned about their own future one X reply at a time days later. That is the part that has done the most damage, and it is the easiest to fix. In conclusion We are not asking the Foundation to reverse course. We are asking it to sequence this correctly. Our asks, updated from the original letter: ◆ Pause the weekly retirement tranches until communications around not throwing contributors aside is improved. ◆ The Foundation has now said Alpenglow community cluster participants should be rewarded. Additional details on this would be great because as it stands, these people are going to not be profitable soon. ◆ Publish the analysis behind the 300k, 100-validator, twelve-month, and 55k figures. ◆ Publish the impact assessment on the current validator set, including how roughly 75% of members came to be deemed non-contributing. ◆ Open a formal consultation with current SFDP members, with a stated process and timeline. ◆ Publish objective criteria and an application process for contribution-based delegation, to run alongside discretionary delegation. ◆ Answer the first-principles question: Why does the SFDP strictly value a new validator over a contributor who has honestly operated for years to improve the Solana network? The Foundation says these changes are about getting to what comes next. We agree that is the goal. What should not come next is booting Solana's contributors to the curb. L33