As a part of our continued efforts to decentralize our protocol, we would like to announce that we are opening a new Node Operator onboarding round for Solana.
You can find the Lido Node Operator landing page here. The purpose of the landing page is to gather all relevant documentation relating to previous and current onboardings in one place, as well as provide a general summary of the application process.
Applying
If you are a Node Operator interested in joining the Lido on Solana Node Operator set, you may submit an application by following the link on the landing page or directly here, once the form opens on May 1st.
If you’ve applied in a previous round but weren’t selected for the short-list, you may indicate that you have already applied and you will not need to fill out the entire form. Alternatively, you may choose to re-fill out the form in case you wish to add additional details to your application.
If you are an existing Solana operator, we will be filtering applications through a very basic set of “minimum requirements”, which are:
- Minimum 10 epochs of operation
- Minimum 500 leader slots in total in the last 10 epochs
- Minimum 1 Solana node software update
- Your node is currently outside the super-minority set (this stipulation may change in future onboarding rounds, but for this round we are only seeking to increase our set via operators who are outside the super-minority)
If you are an operator who does not currently run a Solana node, you may still apply but we will need to obtain extra information in order to better assess your ability to run a node effectively. If you are running a testnet validator, please ensure to provide adequate information about it in your application.
Please note that running a validator for Lido on Solana requires setting up a separate node to your existing one, so this should be taken into account. This Lido-specific validator should be launched with 100% commission rate and setting the withdrawal authority of that validator entity to the Lido program. Operators will earn a 5% commission on the rewards earned from SOL staked with their Lido validator in Lido’s automatically compounding stSOL token. SOL staked with Lido is re-distributed uniformly among operators every time the set is increased. In the future, our goal to create a permissionless system that adjusts delegations for desirable characteristics such as performance, security, geographic and infra setup distribution etc.
Deadline
The application form will be open from May 1 - May 22 May 31 23:59 UTC.
(EDIT: application window extended, see below)
Evaluation and Onboarding
Applications will be evaluated by the Lido Node Operator Sub-governance Group (LNOSG) in late May and a proposed shortlist will be sent to the DAO for approval. Please note that being shortlisted is not a guarantee that you will be onboarded. The DAO ultimately chooses who will be onboarded, and we will be cognizant of DAO and/or community requests to review and propose further options if they are deemed necessary.
Once approved, onboarding new operators usually takes 1-2 weeks, so we aim for the new set of operators to be live on Solana mainnet in late May / early June.
