Steps to staking Solana natively

15 Feb 2022 Guide

This is a step-by-step guide on how you can stake Solana natively, via Solflare, and achieve a return of ~6.67%. Previously, I shared how you can do liquid staking, but that comes with an additional risk – you have to trust another party, exchanging your SOL for a derivative SOL.

In comparison, native staking has almost no risk.

Step 1: Use Solflare

Solflare is one of the Solana wallet and you can stake from the wallet. Other wallets that provide native staking will be similar, but I will use Solflare in this guide.

Expand the chrome extension

Select the Native Staking

Step 2: Enter an amount

I have 10.9 SOL, which I will stake 10 SOL.

I need to have some SOL left to pay for the transaction fees (though just 0.000005).

Step 3: Select a validator

Solana Beach will show all the validators, how much SOL they stake, and their commission.

You will also want to check Stake View on their recent performance, which is the actual APY up to the last 30 epochs (each epoch emits rewards, around 2 days).

Stake View top performing validators

I like Allnodes, which has 0% commission, and has performed well. Moreover, they seems reputable running all kinds of nodes.

A further check on Solana Beach also showed that they are ranked #223 (in term of staking amount), which is low, but good. That is because the point of staking to make the whole network as decentralized as possible. If everyone select the #1 validator, then Solana will be centralized.