Delegation Strategy

When you stake your SOL on Marinade, it gets delegated to a number of high-performing validators using our delegation strategy. Here's how it works.

Quick overview

Delegation is split into three parts:

• Performance-based (60 % of TVL)

• MNDE voting based (20 % of TVL)

• Directed stake (20% of TVL).

Every epoch, Marinade recalculates the performance score of each validator, collects MNDE and mSOL votes, and rebalances stake based on the results. Marinade also looks at commission rugs and delinquent validators and moves the stake elsewhere as soon as possible.

This process runs in a publicly accessible pipeline in the GitHub repository https://github.com/marinade-finance/delegation-strategy-pipeline. Previous scoring runs are also available there.

The ethos is to be transparent and open to all validators.

We evaluate all active validators. The code computing score is available online, and the results are published on-chain. You can view validator details, including their Marinade score, on Marinade's Validator Dashboard.

Delegation strategy

Marinade's delegation strategy

Eligibility criteria to receive stake from Marinade

• Validator is not blacklisted (running harmful mods, commission rugs)

• Validator runs an up-to-date version of the node

• Validator's commission was ≤ 7 % in the past 14 epochs

• Validator has created its PSR bond. Since Epoch 608, the bond must also be funded with SOL (validators must maintain in their bond 1 SOL per 10k SOL delegation they receive)
• Validator's decentralization score is superior to 0.8

• Validator earned at least 80% of the staked-weighted credit average in all of the past 14 finalized epochs

A validator must fulfill the criteria above to receive algorithmic or directed stake from Marinade.

Blacklist

Marinade will blacklist validators that are identified as harming the network. A validator can get blacklisted for:

• Slow voting (also called vote lagging)

• Commission rugs

• Failing to restart the node in the 36 hours following the cluster restart after a halt for at least 2 times

To be removed from the blacklist, the process is the following:

1. If a validator is blacklisted by Marinade's unjustly (e.g. validator's poor networking performance made us believe the validator was vote-lagging), the validator will be removed from the blacklist upon reviewing and approving the claim

2. If a validator, once rightfully blacklisted, chooses to reform their behavior and demonstrate compliance, they will be removed from the blacklist only after an observation period of at least 1 month.

3. Repeat offenders will be permanently blacklisted and prohibited from receiving Marinade stake. Rule 2 does not apply.

4. Validators blacklisted for commission rugs are blacklisted permanently. Rule 2 does not apply.

Technical details

• The delegation strategy scoring runs once per epoch and is based on the past 14 finished epochs

• At the end of each epoch, our bot performs actions to move our stake distribution towards the desired state.

• Starting from Epoch 428, Marinade has produced validator reports that can be viewed in HTML or .csv. Validators can also generate these reports for any epoch and access the data themselves. Go to the Validator report homepage to access here.
• We use ipwhois for geolocation services and data center identification. The data is updated every 24 hours.

• We use Solana on-chain data to collect all metrics about validators apart from geolocation

• We have a public API: https://validators-api.marinade.finance/docs

Useful resources

Playground: https://playground.marinade.finance/ MNDE calculator: https://cogentcrypto.io/MNDECalculator Directed stake dashboard: https://lst-ds-dashboard.solanahub.app/ Github: https://github.com/marinade-finance/delegation-strategy-2 Bonds repository: https://github.com/marinade-finance/validator-bonds