The Solana Foundation has announced Stake Pools to increase the network’s security, promote censorship resistance, and rewards SOL holders in the process. The announcement was made via their official Twitter handle.
The Stake Pool program was enabled via an on-chain governance process, as the Solana Foundation said. Any SOL holder can participate in the process via SolFlare, a non-custodial wallet that allows users to connect with this network.
SOL token holders can earn rewards and help secure the network by staking tokens to one or more validators. Rewards for staked tokens are based on the current inflation rate, total number of SOL staked on the network, and an individual validator’s uptime and commission (fee).
The program was launched to increase the network ability to withstand disruption or attacks, the Solana Foundation said. This capacity is partially measured by looking at the “superminority”, the smallest number of validators capable of launching a successful attack.
Thus, the Stake Pools operate as incentives for the users to place their SOL funds between independent validators, the announcement clarified. As the stake distribution increase, so does the network’s security.
Solana is already one of the most censorship resistant networks (our superminority group is currently 16), but the Solana Foundation can do even more to increase stake distribution.
How To Earn Rewards While Securing Solana
When a user stakes their SOL token, these are distributed across “a larger number of validators”. Then, users earn tokens for delegators represented by the amount deposited, as stated above, plus rewards for staking.
The rewards can be use in other decentralized finance (DeFi) apps, the Solana Foundation said. For example, in the automated market maker Raydium or the decentralized exchange (DEX) Serum.
The stake pool system is comprised of 3 main actors: the manager, capable of earn and update the fess, the staker, capable of adding and removing validators to a pool and rebalancing stake, and the users, those that provide the SOL for an existing stake pool. The Solana Foundation said:
(…) the stake pool only processes totally active stakes. Deposits must come from fully active stakes, and withdrawals return a fully active stake account. This means that stake pool managers, stakers, and users must be comfortable with creating and delegating stakes, which are more advanced operations than sending and receiving SPL tokens and SOL.
Stake pool participates will be able to profit from additional incentives if they meet any of 3 criteria, the Foundation said. First, if they launch a stake pool by August 30, 2021, promoting a definition of censorship resistance. These managers will be eligible for a 100 SOL reward.
If they also reached 100,000 SOL deposit to their pool, they wil receive a 200 SOL grant or a 1,000 SOL grant if they reached 1,000,000 SOL staked.
At the time of writing, SOL trades at $27,01 with a 2.9% loss in the daily chart.
