Introducing Marinade’s all-new Validator Dashboard

As Solana’s first and largest stake pool, Marinade has a longstanding relationship with the validator community. This ranges from discussions over the stake pool’s permissionless delegation strategy, implementing validator gauges to enable community SOL stake delegation through MNDE, and prioritizing and aligning on issues and updates to the blockchain.

Marinade has been compiling validator data each epoch, specifically around how much stake each validator gets via the delegation strategy. While this information has been always available on Github, it hasn’t been so easy to digest or analyze.

In the interest of full transparency and education of SOL staking and stake pools, Marinade has built its own validator dashboard. This all-new dashboard provides insights into not only the 400-plus validators that make up the Marinade stake pool, but feature performance and technical details on all Solana validators. Here’s a quick glimpse at all things possible with the new dashboard (and more features are coming soon!)

The Validator Dashboard landing page

The new dashboard is accessible via the website navigation or via the Validators tab on the staking page.

From the landing page, you can sort validators by APY, commission, Marinade/overall stake and uptime. You can also toggle between whether to show superminority validators, validators receiving Marinade stake and unnamed validators.

Validator details page

From the dashboard you can sort or search for any specific Solana Validator to view details. Each Solana validator now has a dedicated page on Marinade that has their identify and vote account address, as well as a link to their webpage where you can stake directly or learn more information.

Details include current APY, Marinade stake, commission and uptime. The version they are running is also visible so you can see if the validator has kept up with Solana network updates. Node IP, location and provider also provide a glimpse into their decentralization, which also affects how much stake from Marinade they get.

In the future, Marinade plans to make this page even more detailed with insights on what affects the Marinade score for a given validator.

Commission Changes

One recent notable element Marinade has been able to identify is validators cheating on their commissions at the epoch boundary. Many of these validators had previously gone undetected. Still, Marinade has found them and their “real commission” (the epoch’s highest commission that will be kept by the validator) will be seen on their page.

For example, Validator ‘igr8187’ changed their commission to 100% at the end of epoch 387, meaning those who were staking with them received no rewards for the epoch (these validators are blacklisted from receiving Marinade stake pool SOL). The validator dashboard identifies this and includes this in their “real commission” graph:

You can view all the validators caught commission cheating at the epoch boundary in this maintained public notion page.

Want to check how the validator you are staking to is performing? Enter their name or address into the search bar.

You can also see “Skipped slots.” In the Solana network, a skipped slot is a slot where the leader did not produce any block, either because it was offline (delinquent) or because the consensus of validators on-chain followed a different fork. The closer percentage to 0% a validator is, the better performance.

Marinade has been tracking and sharing this information via its Github page, but the Validator Dashboard was designed to make this information more digestible for both retail and developers.

Comparison Tool

Can’t decide which validator to stake to, or which validator to vote with your MNDE in the validator gauges? Check out the comparison tool. You can select and compare validators' total or Marinade stake, APY, commission, and leader slots.

A new validator and staking dictionary

Need some help understanding what some of these technical terms mean? You’re not alone. Marinade has fielded feedback from stakers since its existence and used it to begin compiling a list of terms in a dictionary to assist with education about staking and validators. This dictionary will grow with more terms over time and expand into all things Solana blockchain performance and DeFi.

Validator Dashboard: What’s next?

This is the first version of Marinade’s detailed validator dashboard but additional features are already being installed for v2. Connecting a validator’s performance to a Marinade staking score, reports for validators and their upcoming planned stake for the next epoch is all being built.

Marinade recognizes that some validators still feel that the stake pool’s delegation strategy can be difficult to understand, and large changes in stake delegated to their node are not anticipated. The long-term goal is to make all of this as transparent and easy to understand as possible.

This is the first version of the validator dashboard with a V.2 expected shortly after the New Year. Keep an eye out for more informational tooltips, an expanded dictionary of terms, and much more.

Solana stakers who are more informed with transparent data make the ecosystem safer and more performant for everyone involved. Combined with other great tools built by validators like  Stakewiz,  Solana Compass,  Solana Beach  and  Cogent Crypto, users have more and more tools to make proper decisions about how and where to stake their SOL and understand the performance of each.

Have a special request for the validator dashboard? Request it by visiting  Discord  and sending us a note in the Validator channel.

Visit the new Marinade Validator Dashboard here!