The primary node sits in London, UK, with a backup in Europe. Both are in secure datacenters with power and fibre redundancy.
Latest-generation AMD EPYC Genoa servers with 1,152 GB of RAM and 40 Gbps network connections, running the Solana-Jito-BAM validator client.
The idea is similar to moving money from a current account to a savings account. You assign some or all of your SOL to a validator; the validator's rate comes from Solana's inflation rate, the commission the validator charges, and how well it performs.
Staking is non-custodial: your SOL moves into a stake account that only your wallet can act on, and the validator has no ownership or control over it. The stake becomes active at the next epoch boundary — an epoch runs roughly 36 hours — and earns from then on. Unstaking takes the rest of the current epoch to complete, during which it keeps earning, and then the SOL is yours to withdraw.
Stakers receive a return on their SOL, added to the stake account every epoch and compounding on its own.
The network gets stronger: stake spread across many validators makes Solana more resilient and more decentralised.
Validators earn commission on rewards and transaction fees — and a validator needs a substantial amount of delegated stake — around 200,000 SOL or more — to run at zero commission and still cover its costs. Leapfrog Systems does exactly that; you can check its delegated stake on TopValidators.app .
You only receive rewards at the end of an epoch in which your stake was active. Stake becomes active in the epoch after the one you delegated in, so the first reward lands at the end of that following epoch and every epoch after.
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