Solana Spotlight: The Lotus Validator NFT project

Soliciting community input in an NFT project is bound to return some entertaining replies. That’s especially so with The Lotus community, whose steady drip of facetious comments from the project founder Bunjil spread throughout the thousands of NFT holders of both collections.

And when The Lotus Validator was officially shared with the community in early April, there was plenty of confusion in the comments as to what exactly staking is. (An airdrop? No.)

But fast forward to a month later, and you’d think The Lotus Validator is an OG node from an infrastructure project. A glimpse at the stats of the month-old new node on the Marinade Validator dashboard reveals a high-performing node growing in stake and performing at a level already among the best validators on Solana.

Turns out. NFT degen communities really can get the infrastructure right. Only possible on Solana. Here’s the story of one of the latest Solana NFT projects to enter the validator community: The Lotus Validator:

How The Lotus launched its Solana validator node

As NFT communities have proliferated on the Solana ecosystem over the last couple years, a handful have taken the supremely degen task of not just staking their SOL for rewards for the treasury (like Famous Fox Federation) but operating a node themselves. (See: Degen Apes Academy, MonkeDAO, Udder Chaos, and many more).

Enter The Lotus, a project founded by artist Bunjil with two distinct collections: the original pixel art Lotus Gang, and newer LILY collection.

Solana was where Bunjil first became familiar with NFTs and how blockchains work with online communities. He had gotten to know the people, advantages and drawbacks of the technology in relation to alternatives and determined there was no better place to launch his own project.

It shouldn’t be expected that NFT project artists will have both the capability and bandwidth to operate a high-performing node. In the case of The Lotus, a community member, Jake Burden, stepped in and offered to set up The Lotus’ validator.

“Jake has been a long-time community member with the Lotus with his own mythical lore and I have always got great advice from him,” said Bunjil. “When he came to me and Chambaz with the validator idea it seemed perfect. With his technical expertise and our community reach, I believed we could definitely make one of the largest and best-understood validators for the community. It also made sense to double down and secure the chain at a time when many were discussing leaving it. It felt like good leadership.”

Not all communities may have willing and technologically capable community members like Jake, but the process to start a Solana validator is getting easier and easier. A software engineer with over a decade of experience at startups and large tech companies, Jake didn’t have any issue deploying a new server for the validator. There were some initial mistakes made during the setup process but the Solana community was there for him in places like the Solana Tech and Jito discords as well as their hosting provider Latitude.sh (Manystake).

After “getting their hands dirty” with a manual install, Jake wiped their node and redeployed it with an automated setup by Ansible playbook from Autoclock. Jake still recommends going through the manual process for a better understanding of the validation process.

Even though Jake is a software engineer with nearly a decade of experience at startups and large tech companies, including deploying servers, he still made some mistakes along the way. Community resources like Latitude and Jito helped get the Lotus Validator to the finish line.

“We wanted to be part of Solana’s decentralization story,” said Jake .”With all the FUD about Solana being centralized, we felt it is worth putting some effort in to run a validator for ourselves and show that this NFT community can operate its own node that helps secure the network.”

The validator will bring in additional funds to the project while also rewarding stakers, many of whom are Lotus or LILY holders. But a high-performing node will also attract new eyes to the project.

How Marinade supports independent and community validators like The Lotus

Marinade’s algorithmic delegation strategy, which distributes 60% of the stake pool SOL, is permissionless and stakes to the Top 100 validators.

Thanks to strong performance, it didn’t take long for The Lotus to begin receiving Marinade algorithmic stake, and during epoch 439, enjoyed a large spike from 17k SOL up to 42k. Currently, The Lotus Validator is running a 0% commission special.

It is currently ranked 32nd by Marinade (among thousands) with a Marinade score of over 95%. | View the full statistics of The Lotus Validator in the Marinade Validator Dashboard

Right now, Marinade’s delegation strategy only stakes to 100 validators. While it’s still the largest permissionless stake pool on Solana with over 4M SOL, it’s nevertheless ultra-competitive. That said, if Marinade receives more stake, the mDAO can raise the cap on the amount of validators who receive SOL via the pool.

Another option for validators even if they aren’t currently eligible for algorithmic stake is to utilize the MNDE validator gauges. Community members who hold and lock MNDE can vote for the validator of their choice and their votes translate directly into SOL stake.

Right now, about 41 million MNDE votes control about 940,000 SOL stake. To find out the ROI between MNDE gauges and SOL, check out the MNDE Calculator by Cogent Crypto.

Jake also intends to utilize Marinade’s new Directed Stake product to make the SOL stake with the Lotus liquid. Directed Stake replaces the original “Liquid Self Stake” product Marinade introduced last year to enable validators to get mSOL for their SOL stake. Using directed Stake is easy: simply connect your wallet to the Marinade DApp and select the validator you want to point your SOL to, and it will be added to the delegation.

That means The Lotus will receive more staking rewards while the SOL itself can still be used in DeFi. Visit The Cookbook to see some of the many ways mSOL can be used across Solana.

“Liquid staking tokens can offer a lot of advantages over direct staking,” said Jake. “They aid in decentralization by splitting stake across validators, provide instant liquidity, and some provide extra rewards or enable you to direct stake weight towards specific validators”

So are NFT communities interested in things like DeFi and Decentralization? From the Lotus’ perspective there are signs it matters, and their educational campaign, The Lotus Library, run by contributor Kenyatta, continues to illuminate all the virtues of blockchain beyond holding a pfp. And more interest and awareness in staking (and liquid staking) from the NFT community could inspire more NFT-Fi use cases for liquid staking tokens like mSOL, such as more marketplace or NFT AMM integrations.

After all, a NFT community or protocol can only do as well as the chain it's on, and staking is a key driver of a proof-of-stake network’s prosperity. So what’s good for the network is good for Lotus and LILY holders.

“I think that even if not all the deep, under-the-hood details are known by everyone,” said Jake. “There is at least a sense that our validator is helping to add a vector of security to the network.

“We hope that this validator will serve as a unifying project that The Lotus and LILY community can rally behind.”

You can Direct Stake to The Lotus Validator or any validator on Solana through Marinade’s DApp and stay liquid with mSOL. Check it out