Background

Operating a validator on the Solana network requires extensive technical expertise and continuous maintenance. Daily tasks such as node updates, troubleshooting, performance optimization, and network monitoring demand both skill and time.

These technical and temporal burdens make it difficult for small-scale validators to enter and remain in the ecosystem. Operational costs also present a barrier. Without sufficient stake or financial resources, teams struggle to maintain profitability and are often forced to shut down. While the Solana Foundation provides a staking support program to assist smaller validators, many participants fail to achieve profitability after the support period ends and eventually cease operation.

As a result, stake has concentrated among a limited number of large operators, weakening decentralization across the network. This ongoing validator reduction and stake concentration represent a structural issue that threatens Solana’s foundational principles of speed, fairness, and decentralization.

In Solana, SWQoS (Stake-weighted Quality of Service) determines communication priority based on stake allocation. This design was introduced to prevent spam and disordered transactions, ensuring that trusted nodes are prioritized to maintain network performance.

In practice, however, SWQoS has not been fully utilized. Its configuration is complex, verification tools are limited, and coordination between independently managed validators and RPC operators increases operational difficulty. Furthermore, updating SWQoS settings typically requires restarting validator nodes, which carries the risk of score and reward loss. Although SLV provides a no-downtime migration feature, it requires running redundant infrastructure, keeping operational costs high.

As a result, small stake allocations are rarely applied, and SWQoS bandwidth remains underused and concentrated among a few validators.

Technical, temporal, and economic constraints have combined to reduce validator participation and accelerate stake concentration within the Solana network.

Operating a validator requires not only technical proficiency but also the ability to attract stake through community engagement and information sharing. However, information within the validator community is fragmented, and building trust to gather sufficient stake demands both time and effort. This reality has led many operators to withdraw, leaving fewer than 1,000 active validators as of October 2025.

At the same time, SWQoS—intended to improve reliability—remains difficult to configure and sustain. Although bandwidth capacity exists, only a small number of validators can utilize it effectively, resulting in underused resources and diminished efficiency across the network.

Validator centralization and SWQoS underutilization stem from the same structural cause: the absence of software and economic systems that simplify management and provide appropriate incentives. Validators DAO resolves this by addressing these missing components through technology. By reducing learning, operational, and economic barriers, it enables Solana to restore both decentralization and operational efficiency in a practical manner.