Solana — Active Stake Breakdance

We all know how much Sol different validators have staked to them, but what about the Delegators?

Code: https://github.com/mcf-rocks/active-stake-breakdown

Active Stake Breakdown by Epoch can be seen here.

The breakdown of active stake as delegated to validators is clearly visible on the Solana Beach website. What is not so forthcoming is the distribution of active stake by “stake authority”; a “stake authority” is simply the keypair that controls which validator a stake account is delegated to, i.e. the delegator. A stake account can be split and delegated to several validators, nevertheless the same stake authority authorised it.

I’m giving you a view on the stake authorities. It’s a different perspective, but understand that the “active stake delegated to validators” must equal the “active stake by delegator”, it’s just logical.

Obviously a delegator could easily hide by splitting their holdings, sending funds to a second account and delegating from there, but Solana is “early days”, so I don’t think that would have happened yet.

There is an important caveat we need to introduce here; at this point stake authorities are not necessarily owners. The vast majority of tokens are locked, this includes “the team” and other early investors, it means that they can delegate but not withdraw — until the 7th Jan 2020. That is the Ground-Zero date for Solana; when we find out if there is more demand in the market, than owners looking for liquidity.

Here is the breakdown of active stake as delegated to validators at epoch 127:

The above breakdown is familiar with every Solana validator, and can be verified by looking at Solana Beach. At the same epoch as the above, the corresponding “ownership” by stake authority is shown here:

Obviously that massive block is The Foundation… now we need to bear in mind that there will be many owners (or ppl with the ability to delegate) who decided not to do so at this time… which would be logical, given that inflation (rewards) are not yet enabled — there simply is no incentive to do so.

Due to the way the development roadmap unfolded, the enabling of rewards (inflation) will come at almost exactly the same time as the 7th Jan 2021. On that day, a very very large number of token will “unlock”, that is to say, the owners will be able to sell.

If rewards had happened first, it would have indicated the number of people taking a long term investment in the network. As it happens, we simply don’t know. The market will tell all on the 8th of Jan 2021. ;)

It will be interesting to revisit this page to determine the token distribution among those taking a long term view on the network, because of course such would delegate their tokens.