vax.btc 🧲

2 years running a Solana validator. What does it look like? 1,144 SOL in rewards. 815 SOL in costs. Net: 329 SOL. Year 2: −0.7 SOL. The books are closed, so here's the full P&L, line by line. Revenue ↳ commissions: 320 SOL ↳ block fees: 772 SOL ↳ Jito tips: 52 SOL Costs ↳ vote fees: ~1.1 SOL a day, every day, whether you produce blocks or not (790 SOL total, 239 of it covered by SFDP in year 1) ↳ servers: ~$1,960/month paid yearly (265 SOL at the price on each payment date) ↳ my time: not counted (I never billed myself, which is how every validator P&L is wrong) The stake ↳ year 1: SFDP stake, first-year costs help by the Foundation. @phase_ backed me from the first epoch (5k SOL → 16k at peak) ↳ year 2: mostly paid by the returns of year 1 (server + ) ↳ @DynoSolPool: 17.5k SOL from June 2025, the biggest pool delegation until Jito ↳ @doublezero: ~7.5k SOL for a few months in 2025 ↳ @JPoolSolana: ~2k SOL in early 2026 ↳ Aug 2026: @jito stake lands, 31k SOL @Layer_33_ put break-even for a zero-commission validator around 160k SOL. None of those pools got me near 160k and yet I've been able to clear some profits thanks to a few random blocks with big fees Some hidden costs ↳ Before getting your SFDP stake, you are running a validator that makes 0 money, for as long as it takes to get the stake ↳ Early on I had a few restarts on my machine (Ubuntu auto updates), that did cost me a few epochs of stake each time ↳ Getting called by Pager Duty at 3am is real and a weird experience ↳ Getting stuck in a restart and losing too many credits will get your SFDP stake nuked for a few epochs (that moment when your spare node is on an old version that forked away and a restart was 30 minutes) ↳ I had to handle a Solana upgrade in the middle of the ocean once, was a lot of fun (not) ↳ Paying for 6 months of Alpenglow alphanet (+$500/month) and getting removed from the program a few weeks after AG going live Alpenglow swaps the per-slot vote fees for an admission ticket of ~0.8 SOL a day. Over my two years that's 573 SOL instead of 790, so net 487 instead of 329. Year 2 alone would have gone from −0.7 to about +118. I decided never to join the shady pools that were enabling sandwich attacks and other dark patterns. Never joined any dark pools or anything that would have manipulated the end user's funds. What a ride!