Solana Validator Spotlight: Avaulto

Even for many of the early adopters of Solana, “build mode” remains the order of the day in 2022. That mindset goes for DeFi, NFT projects and validators alike.

For the case of Avaulto, building in the early days meant creating a validator, but now that’s expanding to the world of DApps.

There are now over 2,000 validators on Solana and growing. These core pieces of the proof-of-stake blockchain are helping to keep the Solana blockchain running and decentralized as of October, 2022. Among the earlier independent nodes is Avaulto.

Avaulto, operated by Amir, has been online for about two years — that’s about double the time Marinade’s stake pool has been deployed as the first liquid stake pool on Solana. Avaulto has been a part of the Marinade community since the early days. Today, Avaulto shows off a meaty Level 5, Limited Edition Chef NFT by Marinade as its Twitter PFP.

Avaulto is a proper representation of the symbiotic relationship between validators, Solana and the Marinade stake pool, which directs SOL stake to over 450 validators.

About Avaulto Validator

Amir first got interested in crypto in 2017. Then, two years ago he was introduced to Solana and began researching how its Proof-of-History works and its validator system. He soon met Marco Broeken, a co-founder of Marinade, who invited him to consider running a validator node for the new Proof-of-History blockchain.

Amir was coming from a software engineer background and felt uncomfortable starting a validator node, so with help of Broeken, he managed to learn how to properly handle a system infrastructure to run a Solana validator.

Two years ago the validator community and documentation was not nearly as robust as it is today, but nevertheless thanks to early community support from builders like Marco, Amir took the plunge and successfully launched the Avaulto validator.

At first, Amir didn’t know what an “epoch” was. Fast forward to Solana epoch 357 and Avaulto is a Top 200 validator by stake on Solana and remains a believer in the ecosystem.

“Solana is so mature in terms of architecture & business orientation,” said Amir. “So when it comes to usability, things like fast network, cheap transactions & the smart building-blocks-components (code-design-wise) make it superior compared to different networks, and provides a production-ready product.”

As one of the early validators to join before the bull run, Avaulto applied for and received a SOL stake grant from the Solana Foundation of about 50,000 SOL. Later, when Marinade launched in August, 2021, Avaulto was eligible for stake pool stake.

From August, Marinade grew quickly, passing 1 million SOL by September. Marinade now remains the largest stake pool on Solana with about 7.5 million SOL staked. It is also the only stake pool that delegates to both a wide number of validators (currently over 450) and also does not delegate to the superminority.

“I believe that stake pools are an amazing tool,” said Amir. “And give a lot of confidence to run a Solana node and breakeven on cost early.”

Supporting independent, high-performing nodes all over the world is a core value of Marinade, which is driven to support a prosperous independent validator community. Stake that enters Marinade is distributed by a combination of the stake bot algorithm and validator gauges that help drive network robustness and censorship resistance.

Marinade not only supports a wide range of validators but also supports those who charge a competitive commission that enables them to maintain operations. Avaulto charges a 6% commission which makes it eligible to receive Marinade Stake Pool SOL. Today, Marinade accounts for roughly 40% of Avaulto’s total delegation at 63,875. 7,612 of which comes from the Validator Gauges. A  proposal is currently live  on the mDAO governance that (all else being equal) would elevate the amount of SOL received via the gauges to 20%.

Avaulto is currently ranked 8th on the popular validator site  Stakewiz.com, which awards scores to validators using a wide criteria of performance metrics.

Building a more trustworthy and user-friendly ecosystem

How validators market themselves to attract stake can vary differently based on each validator’s expertise and organization. The Solana community is also seeing projects building of all shapes and sizes, from NFTs to DeFi, begin to run their own validators as well.

For Avaulto, that means working build a more user-friendly and trustworthy Solana ecosystem in addition to operating the validator.  Avaulto.com  is in the midst of an expansion from being a validator into a larger Solana DApp with a wide range of features. Currently in beta, the new  Avaulto Compact website  aims to serve as a trusted home for Solana users to interact with both DeFi and NFT DApps and also help build trust by providing research on which protocols are the most trusted in the ecosystem.

“I want to create this one-stop shop where you have confidence to perform every-day actions on Solana. Staking, sending assets, and give confidence to beginners they can use DeFi and nothing bad will happen.”

So far, the growing beta version of Avaulto.com has added an early trio of DApps: Jupiter, Friktion and Marinade. Longer term, Avaulto is working on products like a “trust score” and to make complex yield strategies simpler by doing it from one place at Avaulto. Avaulto is also working on NFTs — including a feature where you can view and list NFTs directly to magic eden, burn the NFT and get SOL back.

More broadly, Avaulto.com can become a for a dashboard where users can see their whole Solana asset snapshot. And validator revenue share, an idea being introduced and discussed more and more in the ecosystem (The topic of bribes has been hot around Marinade’s kitchen, which will be possible with upcoming governance upgrades), is also being explored.

SOL holders can thank Avaulto or other validators for their commitment to the ecosystem by either staking SOL directly with their node. Or, if they would prefer DeFi liquidity, stake their SOL for mSOL and then use their locked MNDE tokens to vote for them in Marinade’s Validator gauges. These gauge weights determine which validators will receive more SOL stake.

Solana users and builders are invited to collaborate with Avaulto online on Twitter or on the discord server. And of course, Avaulto is one of the many validators who is a regular in the Marinade discord, from discussing validator topics to showing off that juicy Level 5 NFT Chef!