The number of Marinade stake accounts dropped from 500K to 200K. While still not ideal, this represents a significant improvement, bringing the total number of Solana stake accounts back below 1 million. Why are there so many stake accounts? Why +500K stake accounts in H1 2024? And what's the reason for the last cut? In summer 2023, Marinade introduced Marinade Native, a no-smart-contract way to automate Solana staking across multiple validators. Since there is no pooling, each user retains custody of their SOL and is assigned a stake account for every validator in the delegation strategy. With over 100 validators in the set, this means that there are more than 100 stake accounts for every Marinade Native user. With hundreds and eventually thousands of users, the number skyrockets. One of the main reasons for using Marinade is the automated delegation and rebalancing strategy. The protocol programmatically unstakes and stakes based on validators' performance, so users don't need to monitor it manually. Marinade's been covering all the fees for rebalance transactions, including the splitting of stake accounts, which were effectively free before 2024. Starting in 2024, every stake account split costs 0.0023 SOL. With thousands of Marinade Native users and around 1-2 validators getting partially rebalanced every epoch, settling all transactions becomes very expensive. Marinade switches its approach to creating five stake accounts per validator, so that there is no need to split when partially rebalancing from one validator to another. Unstaking 20% from one validator means deactivating one of the five stake accounts. The operational economics are feasible again, but this quickly increases the stake account number from 100K to 600K at its peak. Every bigger Marinade Native user would see 300+ stake accounts on their wallet. With many hopes for the redelegate feature or another workaround, Marinade ultimately agreed with the @anza_xyz team on a possible way to tackle this issue via the move stake feature. Nowadays, every Marinade Native user has a transient account that serves as a buffer for transferring stake and MEV rewards, significantly reducing the total number of stake accounts required.

1/ Solana validators need stake to survive—but that stake isn’t created from thin air. For one to gain, another loses. In many ways, it’s a zero-sum game. 🧵👇