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To stake your SOL you need to use your preferred Wallet (most common are Solflare, Sollet or Phantom Wallet) to create a stake account from your main account and then you delegate that stake account to your chosen validator, you can search by their name (our validator is called Laine) or vote account address.

 

Our vote account address is: GE6atKoWiQ2pt3zL7N13pjNHjdLVys8LinG8qeJLcAiL

This depends on what your priorities are: returns, supporting new validators, risk & network resilience.

 

The Solana network depends on having many validators that operate from different geographic locations to ensure decentralisation and censorship resistance.

 

We have built a tool that aggregates all kinds of data on validators and computes a score that is geared towards recommending good, lower-staked validators. The Wiz Score combines over a dozen metrics and factors in voting and block production, decentralization (geographic and stake), as well as experience and reliability. Check it out on stakewiz.com.

We have multiple servers across data centres in North America and Europe, providing us optimal redundency and performance.

 

We use AMD Epyc CPUs and either 256GB or 512GB RAM as well as high speed NVMe drives. All our servers have a minimum network uplink of 10gbps with some having as high as 2x25gbps to ensure optimal connectivity to the Solana network.

 

One of our trusted hosting partners is Latitude (formerly Maxihost), they have servers available in many locations that are optimally suited for high performance validator or RPC nodes.

 

Your stake has a warming up and a cooling down period. Once you've delegated your stake it usually becomes active from the start of the next Epoch (an Epoch in Solana lasts 2-3 days). You will earn rewards once your stake is active. The rewards are added to your stake account at the end of the epoch. This happens fully automatically by the Solana blockchain. Validators cannot steal or change the rewards you're entitled to.

The commission is the percentage of your rewards that the validator keeps as payment towards their effort in processing Solana transactions on the network. Most validators operate between 3-10%, so at 10% for every 1 SOL in rewards you earn 0.1 goes to the validator and 0.9 go to you.

 

Without commissions validators cannot afford to continue operating as they must pay around 1 SOL per day to vote on the Solana network's transactions.

 

We have operated at 0% for the past few months but from 1 January 2022 we will be changing our commission to 2%. This will allow us remain sustainable as well as invest in further hardware upgrades and research into improving performance.

Well, it's free money! If you have 100 SOL sitting in your wallet, after 12 months you'd still have 100 SOL. But if you stake them, after a year you'd have around 107 SOL (if you chose a good validator). By staking your SOL you earn rewards, kind of like interest on a savings account.

 

Since you can undelegate your SOL at any point (with a 1 epoch cool down period) there is very little reason not to stake your SOL. And by staking your SOL you're contributing to the resilience and strength of the Solana network.

We take the security of our validators very seriously, especially on Solana Mainnet-Beta.

 

Our mainnet server is in an enterprise-grade data centre in Utah, USA. The data centre itself has standard access control measures in place, as well as state of the art climate control and power and network backups.

 

Access to the server is restricted by SSH keys, password login is entirely disabled. Further we operate a strict firewall with no ports outside of those required for Solana and SSH being open.

 

The keys used to operate a validator are comprised of a validator identity key and a vote account key. Both keys must remain on the server and be accessible by the runtime.

However to protect funds and prevent malicious changes to commissions in the case the server is compromised, the authorized withdraw authority of the vote account is a separate key that is stored on a hardware wallet.

 

We have a custom real-time monitoring system that operates from a physically separate server and checks all our validators continously for delinquency, in case delinquency is confirmed for two continuous minutes we receive immediate SMS and Slack notification alerts, which continue until delinquency is resolved.