validator

The independent Solana validator alliance Layer33 responded to the adjustments of the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP) rules. The alliance is composed of independent validators, aiming to push for independent operators to collectively hold at least 33% of the network's stake. Layer33 stated that it acknowledges the foundation's remarks that the network scale has exceeded the initial launch plan, the validator pool has matured, and it faces challenges that were not envisioned in the early stages, believing that the delegation mechanism should evolve accordingly. The organization indicated that the new rules replace long-term contributors with short-term participants for a duration of 12 months.Layer33 mentioned that the foundation, in subsequent statements, indicated that participants from the Alpenglow community cluster provided crucial assistance and should receive direct rewards; part of the related adjustments is to make such rewards possible. The organization stated that the SFDP currently holds over 10 million SOL in remaining delegation, and providing substantial rewards to cluster participants does not require dismantling the existing plan; the foundation expressed that the intended recipients of the rewards are precisely the group prioritized for exit. Layer33 also noted that validators remaining in the program will see their SFDP delegation decrease from approximately 85,000 SOL to 55,000 SOL, reducing by about 30,000 to 35,000 SOL; some operators have already shut down nodes and canceled their Breakpoint schedules.Layer33 stated that it does not demand the foundation to change direction but rather to advance in the correct order and update the requests made in the previous open letter: to suspend weekly exit batches until communication regarding not abandoning contributors improves; to supplement details on rewards for Alpenglow community cluster participants; to disclose the analysis behind the 300,000 SOL external staking graduation line, the cap of 100 validators, the 12-month term, and the 55,000 SOL delegation scale; to publish an impact assessment on the current validator pool, including how about 75% of members are identified as non-contributors; to conduct formal consultations with existing SFDP members with processes and timelines; to disclose contribution-based delegation standards and application processes, running parallel with discretionary delegation; and to explain why the program places more emphasis on new validators rather than contributors who have operated and improved the Solana network for many years.

Scroll announced that it received a vulnerability bounty report on November 3, indicating that there was a vulnerability in the bundle proof validator deployed on the Ethereum mainnet, and it registered a fixed validator for batch version 10 on November 10. Scroll stated that it has confirmed that the vulnerability was not exploited on the mainnet.According to the report, the vulnerability could allow old valid proofs to be accepted for new public inputs, thereby allowing the final confirmation of any state root and withdrawal root. Exploiting this vulnerability requires having a permissioned prover role or enabling the forced batch mode after 7 days without final confirmation.Scroll stated that the forced mode was never enabled, and all 748 final confirmations during the period of the vulnerability used normal proofs, with previous versions of the validator unaffected.

AnomaPay disclosed on platform X that it has discovered an external security vulnerability in the RISC Zero proof system it uses, which may jeopardize user funds. To protect users and ensure the safety of funds, the risc0 validator behind Anoma has been suspended and will be upgraded by the RISC Zero team.AnomaPay stated that the funds deposited by users are safe, but they will be temporarily inaccessible until the Anoma protocol is upgraded to version V2, which includes the new security updates from RISC Zero. The upgrade is expected to take about two weeks. Although this downtime is not ideal, it is necessary to protect user funds. Users do not need to take any action; funds will be automatically migrated to V2 and access will be restored after the upgrade is completed.

The Vice President of Technology at the Solana Foundation, Jacob Creech, responded to the controversy arising from the recent adjustments to the Solana Foundation Delegated Program (SFDP). The adjustments include: setting the participation period for validators in the SFDP to 12 months, automatic graduation after staking 300,000 SOL, capping the number of validators at 100, and requiring participants to run their own validator nodes.Jacob Creech stated that the SFDP originally had three main tasks: to help new validators get started, to establish a healthy testnet, and to allow some validators to test network updates early. As the Solana ecosystem expands and the validator community matures, the original mechanisms have struggled to adequately meet the ever-changing demands of the network. The foundation hopes to shift towards a more proactive and flexible delegation mechanism, focusing on supporting network health and ecosystem contributors. The SFDP will continue to support new validators, and the foundation will also reward validators who make significant contributions to network health through delegation outside of the program. Previously, the foundation had delegated staking to ecosystem contributors like Blueshift and supported validators who were the first to test Frankendancer.In response to community concerns that the adjustments might lead to a decrease in the number of validators, Jacob Creech stated that reducing the number of validators is not the goal of this adjustment. However, if enough high-quality contributors cannot be found, a decline in the number of validators may become a side effect. He also revealed that over 100 validators have submitted materials to apply for continued support.

According to SolanaFloor, Layer 33, composed of independent Solana validators, is calling for a pause on the removal of validators under the new rules of the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP).The new rules group existing members for removal on a weekly basis and limit participation to 12 months, after which validators will lose staking support from the program. The organization warns that the new program's cap of 100 validators and the 12-month limit "are detrimental to decentralization," will push out experienced independent operators, and will concentrate staking in the hands of large validators.

Telcoin posted on platform X that the final preparations for the Telcoin Network mainnet are underway, with the mainnet launch scheduled for December, at which time the first batch of validators will be activated.Previously, in October 2025, blockchain-based financial services company Telcoin completed a $25 million Pre-A round of financing.

The Solana development team Anza posted on platform X, suggesting that Solana mainnet-beta validators urgently upgrade to version Agave 4.4.1, or they will be forked out of the network.This version applies a minimum loading data limit to the loader-v3 ProgramData account, and nodes that do not install the patch are scheduled to be forked out of the network at the 1079th epoch (around 21:30 Beijing time).

The Solana ecosystem MEV infrastructure project Jito announced its first batch of external node operators for BAM, which are Triton One, Bitwise, and SOL Strategies.The three institutions have initiated the testnet access process, and the BAM access for all mainnet validators is expected to open in early Q1 2027.

Principia Research disclosed that elizaOS founder Shaw is reverse engineering Hyperliquid's closed nodes on GitHub. The project has been underway for 6 days and has already attracted 46 contributors, but none of the 96 verification checkpoints have been passed yet.Meanwhile, Hyperliquid's public API data shows that there are 27 active validators on its network, with 5 foundation nodes controlling 47.4% of the staking share. The top three validators collectively account for 36%, which is more than one-third. This data has also sparked discussions about the level of decentralization of the Hyperliquid network.

A proposal for token permissions on the XRP Ledger is expected to be activated on Wednesday. This proposal currently has the support of 33 out of 35 trusted validators.Meanwhile, a related independent proposal aimed at preventing unauthorized token holders is still under review and has not yet entered the activation phase.

Tim Garcia, the head of validator relations at the Solana Foundation, tweeted that the Linux kernel vulnerability CVE-2026-98432 has been fixed in the Linux kernel, but Ubuntu has not yet released a patch.Tim Garcia advised validators running Ubuntu to temporarily block inbound TCP packets containing IPv4 options and to disable multipath TCP and TCP request socket migration.

Solflare announced that new validators are now online. Users can now manually unstake from Solflare (Legacy) and stake to the new validators, or wait for the application update to migrate.The official team will compensate for the rewards interrupted during the migration period, with specific duration and details to be announced later.

EIP-8450 proposal update, intended to introduce a quantum-resistant public key registration mechanism for Ethereum validators, using a hash-based cryptographic scheme, including leanXMSS keys and VRF tree roots.The update clarifies that the registration and replacement of quantum-resistant keys are authorized by BLS signature keys, and sets a replacement delay of at least one Epoch and a replay protection mechanism; this proposal is currently still in the Draft stage and has not yet been deployed.

According to official news, Jupiter has partnered with BitGo to launch a validator for institutions. BitGo's institutional clients can now directly use Jupiter to stake SOL through their existing custody accounts.

According to SolanaFloor, Solflare stated that its staking service provider experienced a security incident that affected the keys held for its validators, which are no longer generating staking rewards. Solflare claimed that user funds were not affected, and the delegated SOL remains in the users' own staking accounts, controlled by their keys.Solflare will guide users to migrate to new validators through an app update, and rewards will resume once staking is activated, with plans to compensate migrating users.

On October 24, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko (Toly) posted an idea on X, planning to utilize Solana validators to build an oracle that allocates voting power based on staking weight, providing price assessments for tokenized assets and using such assets as collateral.According to this concept, validators will participate in price judgments based on the amount of SOL they have staked. The profits generated by the related mechanism could increase revenue for the Solana network through taxation. However, this idea is still in the conceptual stage and is not a formal governance proposal, with no clear implementation timeline or governance voting arrangements at present. If realized in the future, this mechanism could introduce a native alternative to Solana's existing oracle network, but it also involves supply changes brought about by the increase in SOL issuance, as well as potential conflicts of interest and manipulation risks arising from validators participating in collateral pricing.

Lido has launched 0x02 CSM, allowing permissionless operation for validators with a maximum effective balance of 2048 ETH. Operators do not need to self-fund the staking deposit; they only need to provide a bond. The first key requires 32 ETH, and subsequent keys require 30 ETH, with staking allocated by the protocol.This module adopts an initial deposit queue and an additional staking queue with a limit of 32 seats; the initial share cap upon launch is 0.01% of Lido Core TVL, and the first batch of approximately 32 keys will receive seed deposits.

Solana's largest network upgrade since 2020, Alpenglow, officially launched on Wednesday. This upgrade moves validator voting from on-chain to off-chain, packaging votes into certificates that can lock transactions within one to two rounds, aiming to reduce the final confirmation time for transactions from about 6 seconds to approximately 150 milliseconds, speeding it up by about 40 times. If this goal is achieved on the mainnet, Solana's transaction settlement speed will be faster than the blink of an eye, bringing it closer to the trading and payment experience of centralized exchanges.Currently, a 6-second confirmation time means that prices may change before the transaction is locked, causing exchanges and payment applications to wait before considering deposits as complete. In comparison, Ethereum takes about 13 minutes to achieve full final confirmation. At the same time, validator costs are expected to decrease by about 60%: currently, validators spend about 2 SOL daily on voting fees, which doubled after Solana recently reduced block time to about 200 milliseconds; Alpenglow eliminates voting fees, replacing them with a fixed validator entry fee of 0.8 SOL per epoch (approximately 24 hours).The upgrade launch process was not smooth. The testnet has been cleared and restarted from scratch six times since its launch in early May, with one migration failing across the entire network and having to be rolled back. According to an article published by Galaxy Digital, one of about 100 validator operators on the testnet, a subsequent migration was successfully completed, clearing the way for Wednesday's launch. Since these events occurred on a network built specifically for testing, there was no risk to real funds. The upgrade was scheduled to switch at the start of epoch 1064 on Wednesday, with actual changes occurring at slot 459,653,000 after a transition of 5,000 slots.

The founder of the Solana landing service analysis platform Circular, Ben, stated that he believes the trading terminal Axiom charges traders through misleading "validator bribes" and routes the related funds to the landing service Lunar under HelloMoon. Ben mentioned that since April, the bribes paid by Axiom traders to Lunar amount to approximately $55.7 million, but the latest 30-day analysis shows that only about 1% can be traced back to additional on-chain validator incentives, and he inquired whether Axiom shares in this tip revenue.Circular claims that it reconstructed the activities related to Lunar and Axiom from April 26, 2026, to October 19, based on on-chain payment flows: during this period, Lunar received 530,166 SOL in bribes, valued at approximately $55.67 million based on its quoted price of $105/SOL, corresponding to 189 million successful payments of bribes to Lunar from Axiom transactions. In the last 30 days, 45 million Axiom transactions made payments to Lunar, accounting for 80.6% of successful Axiom transactions; Lunar received 138,964 SOL, approximately $14.59 million, of which about 1,579 SOL was attributed to additional on-chain validator incentives, accounting for 1.14%.Ben also cited on-chain cases from September 26 and October 7, stating that after he paid bribes as suggested by the Axiom interface, the identifiable additional priority fee increase was about 1% of the amount paid to Lunar. He indicated that Axiom controls transaction routing and fee recommendations and has published its associated Lunar address on GitHub for verification. The above content represents Circular's on-chain statistics and personal judgment, and the post also states that the related proportions do not exclude other service costs or off-chain payments, and its estimate of the platform's revenue share is not based on tracked payments to Axiom.

A network startup company called Optimum, led by Professor Muriel Médard from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced that its block propagation software mump2p has officially launched on the Ethereum mainnet. The Ethereum liquid staking protocol ether.fi has made mump2p a mandatory requirement for all 12 of its node operators, whereas previously the software was optional for its operators.Optimum stated that there are currently 16 node operators running mump2p in production environments, collectively managing approximately 22,000 validator keys and over 1.4 million staked ETH, accounting for more than 3% of the total staked amount on Ethereum. Partners include Blockdaemon, Everstake, P2P.org, Stakefish, and Bitcoin Suisse. The software operates in a sidecar gateway manner, not replacing Ethereum's default GossipSub, but rather overlaying it on top of libp2p and utilizing random linear network coding technology. Optimum claims that the block arrival speed is 2.42 times faster than GossipSub, with an approximately 7.88 times reduction in arrival time variance.Rok Kopp, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of ether.fi, stated that they will not require the entire validator set to adopt a new infrastructure unless they are confident that it can enhance the overall level of stakers and the network. Médard mentioned that traditional financial institutions invest billions of dollars to shorten execution times to the millisecond level because speed is money. Optimum launched its private testnet in June 2025, having previously completed a $11 million seed round financing led by 1kx, and plans to expand the protocol to other high-throughput blockchains after Ethereum.