Overview

The Solana Foundation has a delegation program that can help new validators get started. The base stake amount is 25k SOL that the solana foundation will stake with your validator. If you meet certain bonus criteria that stake increases to roughly ~80k Sol. As there are more validators we can expect the bonus stake to spread out more over each epoch. You can see the changing amounts per epoch here.

Criteria

The latest information regarding the criteria can be found here

The TL:DR commission 10% or under, at least 100 sol self stake, run a testnet server that succesfully participated in at least 5 of the last 10 testnet epochs.

To get the bonus stake you must not skip your leader position more then 30% + average skip rate in the last epoch (avg skip rate epoch 260 is ~1%) so your skip rape will have to be below 31%. If your validator is set up properly you will not have an issue qualifying for the

Time Lines

The first step is to get staked by the stake bot on the testnet this can take up to 3 months after applying. Once you recieve your stake on the testnet you begin your onboarding process for mainnet. You will be able to see your place in line here.

Solana Tech Discord #delegation-program