A SOL holder who delegates tokens to a validator's stake without running a node themselves. Delegators earn a share of inflation rewards proportional to their stake, minus the validator's commission (typically 0-10%). Delegation is non-custodial—the delegator retains the ability to redelegate or withdraw at any time.
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A SOL holder who delegates tokens to a validator's stake without running a node themselves. Delegators earn a share of inflation rewards proportional to their stake, minus the validator's commission (typically 0-10%). Delegation is non-custodial—the delegator retains the ability to redelegate or withdraw at any time.
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Think of it as part of the chain machinery that keeps ordering, execution, or consensus moving.
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Consensus, leader rotation, slots, epochs, and the runtime.
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Delegator (delegator) Category: Core Protocol Definition: A SOL holder who delegates tokens to a validator's stake without running a node themselves. Delegators earn a share of inflation rewards proportional to their stake, minus the validator's commission (typically 0-10%). Delegation is non-custodial—the delegator retains the ability to redelegate or withdraw at any time. Related: Stake, Validator, Stake Account
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SOL tokens that are delegated to a validator to increase its voting weight and earn staking rewards. Staking is non-custodial—stakers retain ownership of their SOL. Stake activates/deactivates at epoch boundaries with a warmup/cooldown period. Validators with more stake are assigned more leader slots and have proportionally more influence in consensus.
A node that participates in the Solana network by validating transactions, voting on blocks, and (when selected as leader) producing new blocks. Validators run the Agave, Firedancer, or Jito client software, require significant hardware (128+ GB RAM, high-core CPU, NVMe SSD), and earn rewards from inflation and transaction fees.
A dedicated on-chain account that holds delegated SOL for staking. Each stake account has a staker authority (can redelegate) and a withdrawer authority (can withdraw). A stake account can only delegate to one validator at a time, so users create multiple stake accounts to split across validators.
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SOL tokens that are delegated to a validator to increase its voting weight and earn staking rewards. Staking is non-custodial—stakers retain ownership of their SOL. Stake activates/deactivates at epoch boundaries with a warmup/cooldown period. Validators with more stake are assigned more leader slots and have proportionally more influence in consensus.
A node that participates in the Solana network by validating transactions, voting on blocks, and (when selected as leader) producing new blocks. Validators run the Agave, Firedancer, or Jito client software, require significant hardware (128+ GB RAM, high-core CPU, NVMe SSD), and earn rewards from inflation and transaction fees.
A dedicated on-chain account that holds delegated SOL for staking. Each stake account has a staker authority (can redelegate) and a withdrawer authority (can withdraw). A stake account can only delegate to one validator at a time, so users create multiple stake accounts to split across validators.
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A clock mechanism that cryptographically proves the passage of time between events. PoH uses a sequential SHA-256 hash chain where each output becomes the next input, creating a verifiable ordering of events without requiring consensus. The leader produces ~400,000 hashes per slot (~400ms), and any validator can verify the sequence in parallel, enabling Solana's high throughput by removing the need for validators to agree on time.
Solana's custom BFT consensus algorithm built on top of Proof of History. Tower BFT uses PoH as a clock to reduce communication overhead in traditional PBFT from O(n²) to O(n). Validators vote on forks with exponentially increasing lockout periods—each consecutive vote doubles the lockout, making rollbacks progressively more expensive. A fork is finalized when it reaches supermajority (66.7%+ of stake).
A time window during which a designated leader validator can produce a block. Each slot lasts approximately 400 milliseconds. Slots are numbered sequentially from genesis and grouped into epochs of 432,000 slots (~2-3 days). Not every slot produces a block—a skipped slot means the leader was offline or too slow.
A set of entries produced by a leader during a single slot. A block contains transactions bundled into entries, each with a PoH hash proving ordering. Blocks are broken into shreds for network propagation via Turbine. Maximum block size is limited by compute units (48M CU cap per block) rather than byte size.