Eligibility and slot allocation

Baseline requirements

Every validator in JPool must meet these requirements:

• Not on any blacklist (Solana Foundation, Jito Foundation, or internal)
• Not in the superminority
• Non-JPool stake under 750,000 SOL (your total stake minus any JPool delegation)
• Commission ≤ 10% on inflation and MEV rewards
• Published name and avatar
• Active JSOL bond posted (minimum 1 SOL)
• Running a supported Alpenglow-ready validator client
• A BLS vote key registered for the vote account (a one-time step)
• Vote account funded to cover the Validator Admission Ticket (VAT) at every epoch boundary

Alpenglow: the Validator Admission Ticket (VAT)

Since the Alpenglow upgrade, every voting validator pays a Validator Admission Ticket, burned from the vote account at the epoch boundary (about 0.8 SOL per epoch at mainnet's current slot time; the amount can change if the slot time changes). A vote account that cannot cover the ticket (plus account rent) is left out of the next epoch's vote set and leader schedule, and its stakers earn nothing for the epoch that just closed. Keep the vote account topped up with a few epochs of runway ahead of each boundary. To automate it, you can point your block-revenue commission collector at the vote account (SIMD-0232) so it refills from block income; this starts two epochs after you set it and only keeps pace if your block income clears the ticket, so watch the balance rather than assume it covers you. JPool's keeper also tracks member balances and alerts the team to reach you before a boundary would turn your validator away. Registering the vote account's BLS key is a separate one-time prerequisite: without it the account is not admitted at all. If a JPool validator is ever refused, its bond compensates stakers for the lost epochs.

The Cascade: how slots are allocated

The total number of available slots in JPool is calculated by dividing Total Value Locked (in SOL) by 10,000. This means one new validator slot for every 10,000 SOL in TVL.

Validator slots are allocated through a cascading priority system. Unused slots from higher-priority tiers flow down to the next:

Priority	Category	Allocation	Who qualifies
1	Community Good (CG)	40%	Validators with approved CG status
2	Direct Stake (DS)	40% + CG overflow	Validators with direct stake delegations
3	Performance	20% minimum + DS overflow	Top-30 validators by expected yield

CG overflow: If there are fewer CG validators than slots available, unused slots go to Direct Stake.

DS overflow: If there are fewer DS validators than available slots, unused slots go to Performance.

Performance floor: Performance always gets at least 20% of total slots, so high-APY operators are never fully crowded out.

Within-tier ranking

Within each tier, validators compete on merit:

Community Good, ranked by:

1. Ecosystem impact score (CG score assigned by the Validator Council)
2. Direct stake size
3. APY

Direct Stake, ranked by:

1. Direct stake size
2. APY

Minimum 10 SOL direct stake to qualify for a DS slot. Validators below 10 SOL can still receive reduced matching if they hold a slot in another category and have posted a bond.

Performance, ranked by:

1. Expected yield (leader-slot luck priced out, measured over the benchmark window)
2. Credits ratio (breaks exact yield ties)
3. Vote account address (final deterministic tiebreak)

Alpenglow: expected yield

Under Alpenglow, half of every vote reward goes to the leader of the block that carries it, so a validator's realized APY now swings with how many leader slots it happened to draw. To keep ranking fair, JPool scores the expected yield instead: the reward with the leader portion re-priced to the slots the validator's stake entitles it to, at the validator's own block-production rate. MEV counts through the validator's MEV commission, not the tips it realized. If you run leader slots, run a Jito tip distribution account: a validator collecting no tips scores zero MEV yield in epochs where it draws several leader slots, which drags its ranking down. Credits are no longer a vote count; they scale with stake and only break exact yield ties.

INFO

If you are running a validator or plan to bootstrap one, check out SVT. It's a free validator management tool that can improve your node's performance and make your life easier.

Operations

Rebalancing

Stake changes are gradual, with no sudden large shifts:

• Maximum 2.5% total pool change per epoch
• Stake is rebalanced every epoch
• Up to 10 new validators per epoch
• Direct stake delegation available instantly

Suspension and recovery

Bond health below 50% triggers suspension (delegation zeroed). Standard validators have about 10 days to recover; DS-protected validators get about 21 days. Failure to recover means permanent removal.

Suspicious activity

Validators that exhibit unusual behavior receive a suspicious flag and a warning visible in the dashboard. This does not trigger removal on its own, but serves as an early signal for operators to investigate.

A validator is flagged as suspicious if any of the following conditions are true:

• Missing name or avatar in published validator metadata
• Poor performer according to cluster-wide performance analysis
• Suspicious APY drop of more than 20% relative to the previous epoch, unless the validator's bond health is at 100% (a fully funded bond exempts the validator from this check)

TIP

If your validator is flagged as suspicious, check the warning message in the Validator Dashboard for the specific reason. Most flags can be resolved by updating your metadata, improving node performance, or topping up your bond.

Instant removal

The following conditions trigger instant removal from the program:

• Commission > 10%
• Non-JPool stake > 750K SOL
• Added to a blacklist
• Entering the superminority
• Missing name or avatar
• Bond depleted (< 50%) while not DS-protected
• Current-epoch uptime below the program's minimum reliability threshold
• Very suspicious APY drop (absolute change exceeding 50%)

INFO

If you believe your validator was unfairly removed from the Program, please contact us and we will help you solve the problem.