Layer33

We are Layer33:

A collective of 25 independent @Solana validators committed to maintaining network decentralization.

Our mission: ensure 33% of stake remains with independent, high-performance operators.

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Response to the Foundation on SFDP changes

We appreciate the Foundation responding publicly. Conversations at Breakpoint and Block Zero are valuable, but public discourse lets operators who cannot attend those events be heard too. And there is real agreement in the response, so let's start there.

The response says Solana is much larger than when SFDP started, that the validator set has matured, and that the network faces challenges nobody conceived of at the beginning. We agree. We said the same thing in our letter. Solana is entering its next stage, and delegation should evolve with it.

Where we part ways is what that evolution looks like. If the network has matured, the goalposts should move. Instead, SFDP is being redefined to complete its original goal again. That is not the next stage. It is the first stage on a loop, except the new rules boot the long-term contributors who are the output of the first stage and replace them with short-term 12 month tenants. The network trades operators who stayed for years for operators who are built to leave. It regressed, not progressed.

Supporting new validators and supporting existing contributors are not mutually exclusive. A mature program does both. These rules prioritize only one group, and it is not the existing talent.

First Principles
The question is simple: Why does the new program value a brand new validator over one that has been operating reliably for three or more years?

New validators will continue to receive stake. Validators who have run through every upgrade, every outage, and every cluster test since 2023 will lose it. We have read the announcement and the response several times and cannot construct the argument that makes the first group more valuable to network health than the second. If that argument exists, we would like to hear it.

Alpenglow Community Cluster
In follow-up comments, the Foundation said the Alpenglow community cluster participants provided crucial help, that they should be directly rewarded, and that these changes exist in part to make that possible. We welcome that. It is the first time the Foundation has said it.

But it raises more questions than it answers.

First, none of this was communicated with the initial announcement. The announcement said: you are out, the offboarding tranches start now. Only after independent validators pushed back publicly did the Foundation say contributors would be rewarded. And when asked how, the answer was opaque. Operators who ran the cluster at their own expense did not know until this week that they were about to lose their delegation, and still do not know whether they will get any of it back.

Second, the Foundation says that with so much stake tied up in SFDP there was no way to reward the cluster participants. That is hard to accept. SFDP currently holds over 10 million SOL in residual. Rewarding a group of cluster participants materially would not have required dismantling the program as we know it.
Third, the people the Foundation now says it wants to reward are the people being retired first. If the intent is to reward them, the sequence should be reward first, then restructure. Not retire, then promise.

So if participating in the cluster is seen as valuable, will they be rewarded? Why does the retirement proceed before that is defined?

"We reward contributors" is still not a program
One of the responses says the intent is not to make running a validator a secondary activity, but to directly reward those improving network health. We agree with that framing entirely. It is close to word for word what our letter proposed. The response also says validators who contribute to network health should be rewarded, and points to past discretionary delegations to Blueshift and early Frankendancer operators as proof. We agree those were good decisions and believe discretionary delegations should continue to exist. But a handful of discretionary delegations is not a system.

In addition, intent is not process. There are still no criteria, no application, and no timeline. Most contributors did not know discretionary delegation existed until this response. Now that they do, they have no idea how to access it or whether they qualify. "We staked to these guys before" is not an answer to "how do I survive on solana." Meanwhile contributors are shutting down nodes and cancelling Breakpoint trips because the only concrete thing they have been told is that their stake is leaving.

This is not an argument against discretionary delegation. It is an argument for giving contributors something concrete to grasp to. Objective criteria show talented operators what the network values and can grow the contributor count. Discretionary delegation catches what the criteria miss. Both together work. Discretion alone asks everyone to trust a process they cannot see.

On the feedback
Asked to publish the feedback behind these changes, the Foundation pointed to a Discord channel where SFDP validators call out malicious or harmful operators.
We know the channel. The people in it do real work. But that is not feedback on program design. It is validators reporting bad actors, and if the problem was bad actors, the obvious response was to bring those validators in and use their tools to remove the bad actors directly. Instead these changes aimed to retire the people doing the reporting along with the people they were reporting. There is a real chance good actors are now shut down for having spent their time calling out bad ones to improve the network.

The changes themselves
The response says SFDP was not reactive enough. On that, fair. The 1M SOL cap was badly outdated. But these changes do not trim fat. They cut into bone.
The delegation cut: The validators who survive the retirement see their SFDP delegation drop from roughly 85k SOL to 55k. A 30k- 35k SOL cut is a severe hit for any independent validator, from any source. For many it is the difference between profitable and not.

The twelve-month retirement: An automatic clock tells every operator in the program that they are a tenant with an eviction date. That is not how you retain the people you want. An annual review that renews contributors and removes the inactive would achieve the same accountability without the eviction notice.

The 100-validator cap: If more than 100 operators meet the criteria, why turn them away? If fewer do, the cap is irrelevant. Either way it serves no purpose except to signal scarcity. Was any analysis done to arrive at 100? If so, can it be published? If the other changes are implemented, the program likely lands near that number on its own without needing to announce a ceiling.

The timing: Breakpoint and Block Zero are days away. Independent validators who booked travel to attend are now being told they are no longer viable. Some even sponsored events. Some have cancelled their tickets. Some have already turned their validators off. Block Zero in particular is organized, hosted, attended, and sponsored by many of the validators now on the chopping block. At least one sponsor has said publicly that they would have reconsidered their sponsorship had they known they would be losing SFDP stake. These are exactly the people the network should be fighting to keep, and the Foundation chose the week before its own conference to tell them to leave.

The communication problem underneath all of it
Step back and look at the sequence. The announcement said: you are out, tranches start now. Nothing about rewarding contributors. Nothing about Alpenglow. Nothing about where the stake goes. After the community pushed back, the Foundation said contributors would be rewarded but could not say how.

If the plan all along was to support contributors, that should have been the headline, with criteria attached. Instead the people affected have learned about their own future one X reply at a time days later. That is the part that has done the most damage, and it is the easiest to fix.

In conclusion
We are not asking the Foundation to reverse course. We are asking it to sequence this correctly. Our asks, updated from the original letter:
◆ Pause the weekly retirement tranches until communications around not throwing contributors aside is improved.
◆ The Foundation has now said Alpenglow community cluster participants should be rewarded. Additional details on this would be great because as it stands, these people are going to not be profitable soon.
◆ Publish the analysis behind the 300k, 100-validator, twelve-month, and 55k figures.
◆ Publish the impact assessment on the current validator set, including how roughly 75% of members came to be deemed non-contributing.
◆ Open a formal consultation with current SFDP members, with a stated process and timeline.
◆ Publish objective criteria and an application process for contribution-based delegation, to run alongside discretionary delegation.
◆ Answer the first-principles question: Why does the SFDP strictly value a new validator over a contributor who has honestly operated for years to improve the Solana network?

The Foundation says these changes are about getting to what comes next. We agree that is the goal. What should not come next is booting Solana's contributors to the curb.

L33

An open letter to the Solana Foundation on the new SFDP rules

On November 6, the Solana Foundation announced new rules for the Solana Foundation Delegation Program: a twelve-month membership term, graduation at 300k SOL of external stake, a hard cap of 100 validators, and the retirement of existing members in weekly tranches.
We are writing because we believe these changes work against decentralization, and because they will push out many of the hardest working and best-faith operators Solana has ever had. These are the quiet ones. They do not run marketing campaigns or pick fights on X for impressions. They run nodes, they run them well, and they make valuable contributions to the network while doing it.

◆ The incubator model has not worked ◆
SFDP was built as a launchpad for new validators, and that was the right goal when the validator set needed bootstrapping. That job is done. The goal posts need to move.

On paper, twelve months of delegation followed by forced graduation is a sink-or-swim model: incubate new operators, let natural selection remove the ones who cannot make it. In practice it will play out differently. Validators will join, collect earnings for twelve months, and leave. That is not a net new independent operator. It is a short-term tenant.

The deeper problem is that attracting stake outside SFDP is close to impossible unless you are already in the superminority. The highest-staked validators keep attracting even more stake, so the superminority is shrinking in count while growing in share. Under these rules it sits on top of a constantly churning set of 100 SFDP nodes. Churn is not decentralization. It is a revolving door with an ever-smaller group of ever-larger operators on the other side.

Meanwhile, the operators who actually push the network forward are the ones being cut. The people who tirelessly tested the new governance system before it went live. The people who moved their nodes to different ASNs, at their own cost, because ASN diversity mattered. The people who lose sleep for urgent upgrades. The people who carried Alpenglow to mainnet, which we come back to below. Those are the operators this program is now designed to remove. The longer you have been on Solana, the worse this program is for you.

◆ The Teraswitch outage is the case study ◆
When Teraswitch went down, the network did not halt. It stayed up because enough stake was spread across enough independent validators on enough different ASNs to keep consensus alive. That distribution did not happen by accident. It existed because SFDP supported the number of validators it did and because SFDP created the ASN rule. And stake on Solana increased after the outage. The market saw a network absorb a major provider failure without blinking, and rewarded it.
Shrink the program to 100 validators and concentrate the rest with a handful of operators, and the next provider outage ends very differently. The Foundation is dismantling the exact safety margin that kept the chain from halting.

The numbers are not abstract. At the operator level, Solana's Nakamoto coefficient is 8 today. It was 6 until Alpenglow raised the liveness threshold from 33% to 40%. At the 20% safety threshold, the coefficient is 3. That is a long way from the 18 or so that gets repeated in marketing. These rules push every one of those figures the wrong way.

◆ Alpenglow was carried by independents, and independents are paying for it ◆
Alpenglow did not reach mainnet on its own. It got there because of the community cluster, and the community cluster was run almost entirely by independent validators. Not a single operator from the superminority participated. The largest validators on the network, the ones about to receive the stake being taken from us, contributed nothing to the most important upgrade Solana has shipped.

The history matters. When independent validators raised concerns about 200ms block times and the operational/financial load it put on smaller operators, the Foundation's answer was to participate in the Alpenglow community cluster and accelerate the migration. So we did. We paid for the extra servers. We stayed up until 2 and 4 AM through dozens of regenesis’s. We absorbed weeks of accelerated block times and accompanying doubling vote costs, on the understanding that Alpenglow would make it worth it.
Alpenglow migrated to mainnet a few weeks ago. Before most of us have earned back a fraction of what that period cost, SFDP is retiring us.

The entire burden of 200ms and the Alpenglow migration on independent validators, and the moment the work was done, the Foundation moved to cut us. At minimum, the operators who carried that upgrade should be allowed to run on Alpenglow mainnet under existing delegation for six months before any retirement takes effect. That way they can recover their costs.

◆ Who actually contributes to the network ◆
Measured against stake, lower-staked validators contribute far more back to the network than their higher-staked counterparts. This is not a matter of character. It is structural.

Large operators have investors and shareholders who expect profit to be maximized. Testnet participation, client diversity work, community infrastructure, and governance testing do not make money. The largest operators are therefore discouraged from doing any of it, and for the most part they do not. Alpenglow is the clearest example.

Independent operators are the opposite. We are expected to contribute, we are judged on it, and we do. SFDP spent years building that expectation into its own criteria. The new rules now retire the operators who met the bar and hand the stake to operators who are built not to.

◆ Institutional delegation is moving stake in the wrong direction ◆
Our understanding is that the Foundation intends to redirect stake toward institutional validators. Institutions outsource risk; that is what they do. We expect the long-term result to be institutions white-labelling through a small number of existing superminority operators. Stake taken from independent validators will end up concentrated with the operators who already hold the most of it.

That is centralization in its purest form. There is a harder truth underneath this. The independent validator set was the proof point. Early community operators were what made Solana credible enough for the people in suits to start paying attention and writing checks. Decentralization was the pitch. Now that the money has started to arrive, the operators who were the pitch are being shown the door to make room for it.

People who gave Solana their everything deserve better than being used as leverage and then being thrown away.

Decentralization is not a vanity metric. It is not a position to take the moral high ground from when criticizing a competitor like Hyperliquid, and it is not a narrative to be respun each time compliance requirements get clarified. Decentralization is why this industry exists in the first place.

Institutions are not bad actors (usually). But they are not network stewards. They have no mandate to care about client diversity, ASN spread, or testnet participation, and no operational capacity to contribute to any of it even if they wanted to. The better outcome for everyone is to route that stake to the independent operators who have already proven they will protect it.

◆ SFDP needs a purpose again ◆
If the program no longer exists to support independent operators or diversity, and the incubator model does not work in practice, it is fair to ask what the program exists for.

We propose it becomes a long-term independent contributor program, where the contribution being measured is network health itself: uptime through upgrades, client diversity, ASN and geographic diversity, supporting new innovative initiatives like community cluster participation, governance testing, etc. The operators who carried Alpenglow testing are exactly the people such a program should be rewarding. Inactivity means removal. Operators who do this work should be rewarded for as long as they keep doing it, not retired on a calendar, and not asked to become something other than validators to stay eligible.

That model aligns the program's incentives with the long-term success of the network. Arbitrarily picking 100 validators and churning them once a year aligns them with nothing.

◆ What we are asking for ◆
1. Pause the weekly retirement tranches until the community has been consulted.
2. Give current members who participated in the Alpenglow community cluster a minimum of six months of continued delegation on Alpenglow mainnet before any retirement takes effect.
3. Publish the analysis behind the arbitrary 100-validator cap, and twelve-month figures.
4. Open a formal consultation with current SFDP members before the rules are finalized.
5. Adopt the contributor model above as a replacement for, or alongside, the incubator model.

Solana's resilience was built by people who showed up when it was hard and did not expect to be thanked. We are asking the Foundation not to design them out of the network.

◆ This is what the independent set actually does ◆
The independent validator set, even within Layer33, has been able to achieve many things. Across this group alone, we have:

◆ Supported the official Solana testnet faucet with validator rewards from over 33 million testnet SOL delegated across more than 5k stake accounts, replenishing roughly 450k testnet SOL per month so new validators and developers can deploy before touching mainnet
◆ Built the devnet faucet and the Solana Hardware Compatibility List that operators use to spec machines
◆ Been among the first mainnet validators to run Frankendancer, and later to adopt full Firedancer, on our own hardware, before client diversity was a talking point
◆ Made open source contributions to solana-program, Firedancer, and DoubleZero, plus open source tooling that lets operators switch clients and handle updates automatically
◆ Built a free public API and chart suite for validator and network data that powers dozens of tools and sites across the ecosystem
◆ Built public dashboards that have repeatedly exposed malicious validator behavior around delayed blocks and held bad actors accountable
◆ Shipped the first UI for diagnosing skipped block issues, and staking tools for tip harvesting and stake account cleanup
◆ Co-authored the Validator Voting Behavior Study
Built Nakaflow, which tracks Solana's Nakamoto coefficient against other chains
◆ Contributed to governance design from the beginning, and are key contributors to the new governance platform launching in 2026
◆ Run the monthly validator community call continuously for more than three years
◆ Co-founded the Block Zero validator conference, and organized and sponsored every edition since inception
◆ Built validator infrastructure in underserved regions, including the only major validator between Dallas and Miami and the oldest Brazil-based validator, both on dedicated hardware
◆ Won multiple Solana hackathons
◆ Still host multiple hackathons across Solana every year
◆ Created one of the first Solana-native transaction indexing platforms, used by consumers and teams to understand on-chain activity at scale
◆ Built early DAO and governance tooling adopted by BONK and other Solana-native projects
◆ Built stake pools and delegation tooling that route stake toward performance and decentralization
◆ Reinvested validator revenue into Solana-native startups, hackathon track sponsorships, free web3 security education, and ongoing donations to animal welfare, clean energy, and men's health charities
◆ Kept genesis validators running on our own fleets across multiple locations, delegating our own stake to other operators who contribute to network health
◆ Made up the bulk of the Alpenglow community cluster, on our own servers and our own time, to get the upgrade to mainnet faster

Several of these have been running for three years or more with no end date. That is what a long-term contributor looks like. A twelve-month clock does not describe it.

None of this was required. None of it counts under the new rules. With these changes actioned, institutions like Figment get propped up and the independent validator set gets dismantled. Under that model, none of the above would have existed, and the next round of contributions like these will not exist either.

The independent validator set is normally quiet. We work siloed in our own day-to-day operations. Decentralized, you might say. We focus on validator and network performance, not for ourselves, but so that Solana thrives. For all of us to come together and speak out against a single change means something is truly broken.

This letter may disappear into the void as the Foundation moves to support the large institutional players, the ones who do not care about Solana, at the expense of the people who do. Even so, we wanted our position on the record.
L33

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1000 epochs is just the beginning, but it's absolutely worth celebrating 💪 We'll see you all at 2000!

Congrats, @solana!!