Solana tightens validator funding rules: participation term set at 12 months, unplanned staking over 300,000 SOL will be automatically disqualified.

Jacob Creech, technical vice president of the Solana Foundation, has responded to the controversy sparked by recent adjustments to the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP). The changes include setting a 12-month participation term for validators in the SFDP, automatic graduation once staking reaches 300,000 SOL, capping the number of validators at 100, and requiring participants to operate their own validator nodes. Creech noted that the SFDP originally had three core missions: helping new validators launch, building a healthy testnet, and enabling select validators to test network updates in advance. As the Solana ecosystem has expanded and its validator community matured, the original SFDP mechanisms can no longer fully adapt to the network’s evolving needs. The foundation thus aims to shift to a more proactive, flexible delegation model focused on supporting network health and ecosystem contributors. The SFDP will continue to back new validators, while the foundation will also reward validators making significant contributions to network health via delegation outside the SFDP. Previously, the foundation has allocated staking to ecosystem contributors such as Blueshift and supported validators that were among the first to test Frankendancer. In response to community concerns that the adjustments could reduce the number of validators, Creech emphasized that cutting validator counts is not the goal of the changes, though a decline could be an unintended outcome if enough high-quality contributors cannot be secured. He also revealed that over 100 validators have already submitted applications to retain support.