Halve the Validator Admission Ticket

[anselsol]

Draft SIMD on my fork: SIMD-XXXX

I ran a mainnet validator for 2 years and shut it down on Nov 9, right after the SFDP changes.

The numbers, all 2 years:

• Rewards: 1,144 SOL (commission 320, block fees 772, Jito tips 52)
• Vote fees: 790 SOL (239 of it covered by SFDP in year 1)
• Servers: 265 SOL
• Net: 329 SOL. Year 2: -0.7 SOL.

Vote fees were my biggest cost line, every month, whether I produced blocks or not.

The ask

VAT × 0.5 at every slot-time stage in SIMD-0525. At today's 200ms stage that's 0.8 → 0.4 SOL per epoch.

Why now

SIMD-0326 set the VAT at 80% of the old vote fees so Alpenglow wouldn't shock anyone's economics, and left adaptive pricing to future SIMDs. 2 things moved since:

The subsidy is ending. New SFDP rules (Nov 6): 12 months max, 100 validators max. At epoch 1077, 337 validators held Foundation stake, about half the set. Once that support is gone, the VAT is the fixed cost that decides who stays.

What it costs, what it buys

• Per validator: 292 → 146 SOL a year
• Stake needed for 5% commission to cover the VAT: ~112k → ~56k SOL
• Burn: ~102k SOL a year less, about 0.45% of annual issuance

Max analysis (thread) put a safe VAT at 0.135 SOL/day. A 50% cut stays well above that floor, so this is the conservative version.

The SIMD also proposes revisiting the VAT once the set passes 1,500 or when Rotor / MCP ship, whichever comes first.

What I considered and dropped

• A bigger cut: maybe later, with data from this one.

What I'm asking for

• Operators: reply with your own numbers (stake, monthly costs, what share VAT eats). Real P&Ls make this hard to wave away.
• everyone else: discuss

[Devour6]

I am in full support. With the current validator count and the continuous decrease, i don't think the VAT needs to be so high

[davidrhodus]

I support this. -- Initial solution anza-xyz/agave#16896