Validator growth

General
#1

Hey Solana users & validators, I would like to suggest a possible solution for a validator & staker growth.

As of today, the most common way to lure new stakers by validators is to offer lower and lower fees, such causes are harming the ecosystem for a few reasons.

  1. those “low fee” stakers will leave for the next “best” APY validator ASAP(probably)
  2. the validator don’t earn a reward for his work
  3. harming other validators to succeed
  4. create a “bad environment” for Growth(nakamoto coefficient, new user’s education, etc )

The objective: create a layer of uniqueness for a validator without “leaving” the regular stake mechanism.

The goal: enable validators to offer “incentives” to stakers(off-chain/on-chain rewards(content access/NFT/anything?)).

The problem: so at the moment, when a validator wants to incentivize his stakers(rather than 0% fee) he lucks of confidence since he doesn’t have any security to “gift” anything because the staker can leave at any time(or right after been incentivize)

possible solution: As of today, we have a few native tools we can use to create a “secure” environment for this issue. The tools are coming in a formation of code- we can use locking & authorization utilities to execute the solution

steps to the solution:

  1. limit the stake authority to unreachable public key - this way a validator can incentivize their stakers without the risk of losing them once they get the incentive.
  2. set lockup time so a staker cannot withdraw his stake account
  3. leave withdraw authority as-is

I would like to hear your opinion as stakers/validators of the network, how would you feel about the such solution?

Background on me: I am a solana validator for 2 yrs (https://avaulto.com/) and a developer with 10yrs exp

An app I tried to implement the idea:
http://compact-defi.avaulto.com/

#2

I really like this idea. I think the race to the bottom isn’t healthy for the validator ecosystem, and it’s good that you’re thinking along these lines. Basically your idea is to offer stake lockups/stake “fixed deposit” primitives. I think this is a good idea but at the end of the day, validators need to deliver value in return for that lockup. What that value can be is the big question.

1 Like
#3

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
I guess that eventually every validator can offer whatever he wants for the staker lockup.
But would be difficult to enforce it (offchain-onchain)