Marinade's Solana Validator Spotlight: Solana Compass
On April 30th, the validators of Solana stepped out of the shadows and for a brief moment, the eyes of crypto were upon them.
On April 30th, the validators of Solana stepped out of the shadows and for a brief moment, the eyes of crypto were upon them.
The day will go down as a surreal one for crypto in 2022 as NFT hype on both Solana and Ethereum (Yuga Labs’ Otherside) chains triggered a swarm of humans — and their bots — to NFT platforms in hopes of minting a piece of anticipated collections.
Botting on Metaplex proved to be the main culprit of bringing a halt to Solana Mainnet Beta as over 6 million transactions per second were recorded due to a swarm of bot activity attacking the Candy Machine minting program. Meanwhile, on Ethereum, transactions failed and soared in costs into the thousands of dollars.
For Solana, getting the blocks running again fell squarely on the Solana validators. Turns out, this was a moment the validator community was ready for. Testnet drills had been taking place in order to get validators to understand how to restart the network together, correctly and in the most efficient way possible.
Among those in virtual attendance during the restart was Jonny, operator of the Solana Compass Validator.
“I thought it was really positive, an impressive group effort,” recalls Jonny. “By the time I was online there were people taking charge. Laine was good at working on where to restart the clock at which point in the ledger.”
Within about 7 hours, at 3:30 UTC on May 1, Solana was validating blocks once again and new mitigations had been installed and upgraded to battle the bots.
The validators had done their job. Jonny and his validator colleagues could now return to the background.
The origins of Solana Compass validator
Like many other top independent validators on Solana, Jonny comes from a software background. He’d experimented with building a CPU mining tool on Monero in 2017. But the market crashed before it launched and Jonny moved on to other interests.
He returned in 2021 to explore innovations in the crypto space since he left Monero and began exploring the Solana ecosystem and was pleasantly surprised at the advancements of blockchain, especially for consumers.
“It was the first time i didn’t i didn’t have to download chains,” Jonny recalls. “Things just worked nicely, between the browser extension, transactions were fast and smooth and cheap. For the first time I thought this does have potential.
“It was always interesting technology but couldn’t see a guy down at the pub using it. but now it had legs and I wanted to get involved.”
Soon after taking interest, Jonny contracted COVID-19 and was forced to quarantine and recover. He used the downtime as an opportunity dive deeper down the Solana ecosystem rabbit hole and specifically what it takes to spin up a validator.
“There was nothing to do but scroll thru Discord,” recalls Jonny. “I spent a week learning what kind of machine you need, your responsibilities and the situations that arise, and by the time I felt better I had learned a lot and thought I should take action.”
Jonny’s next steps were to build a simple website on Github pages about staking to test the waters. Soon enough the guides were attracting a few hundred people per day and gave him the confidence to build what is now known as the Solana Compass site.
Today it is a key resource for validator information, guides to staking and stake pools, as well as token swaps and prices. You can browse individual validator statistics and also compare stake pools on Solana.
After 5–6 weeks of research and analysis, Jonny launched the Solana Compass validator in mid-October and by the end of the first epoch began getting stake.
A view of Solana Compass’ Top Validators by Performance dashboard.
Effective self-marketing is essential for new validators to get up and running, and Solana Compass, in addition to continuing to be active within Discords and communities across Solana has proven effective for Solana Compass. As of May 12, the validator now has over 130,000 SOL staked.
But a key part of the growth in addition to his own efforts was receiving SOL from stake pools. As the price of SOL rose, the average user is staking smaller amounts, as little as 1–3 SOL at a time. So for a validator to break even — estimated at about 50,000 SOL, attracting stake pool SOL is critical. During research, Jonny studied how to optimize for Marinade stake was learning how to be eligible for the pool. | Read more: Marinade’s Validators Guide
“Starting a validator would not have been feasible if there wasn’t a strong chance I could begin earning stake from Marinade’s stake pool,” said Jonny. “Marinade stands out to me because I can see that for a lot of prospective validators, it’s important to see you can have support outside your own marketing efforts. Marinade is mission driven and supports small validators.”
One element about Marinade that Jonny particularly likes is that he noticed other stake pools are more favorable to 0% commission validators and if validators add commission they lose stake. With Marinade, however, validators can still earn a commission while receiving Marinade stake.
“This support from Marinade is vital for the health of Solana’s ecosystem,” said Jonny. “Only whales can afford to run validators on 0% commission forever. So in order for Solana to thrive and continue to decentralize it’s important for stake pools and stakers alike to support smaller, independent validators with low, rather than ‘zero’ fees.”
Jonny is optimistic the updates to Solana Mainnet beta following the restart will result in continued resilience against bots and the platform will continue to become more stable. But the success of the restart, done solely by the proactive validator community, in addition to new applications has him feeling bullish on the future. Blockchain downtime was only 7 hours, which has decreased significantly from past outages. Jonny recently attended the Solana Hacker House in Prague to get a first-hand look at all the energy on the blockchain.
“I was blown away at how much people are doing in the space,” said Jonny. “The main things you see now are DeFi and NFTs, but things like Solana Pay have the potential to bring a whole new world of people into the space.”
About Marinade
Marinade.Finance is the first non-custodial liquid staking protocol built on Solana. Stake your SOL tokens with Marinade and receive mSOL (“marinated SOL”) tokens in return that can be used in decentralized finance (DeFi). mSOL is the most widely integrated collateralized version of SOL. The price of mSOL goes up relative to SOL each epoch, with rewards being accrued into your stake account.
Marinade’s delegation strategy stakes to 400+ validators that are selected automatically by an open-source, fair formula based on performance, commission, and decentralization.
