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Fun fact: The initial capital requirement for an individual to run a PROFITABLE (key word here) Solana validator is about 5500 $SOL ($935,000 at time of writing).
An over 10x increase compared to running an Ethereum validator, which is 32 $ETH ($86,000 at time of writing). I’ve created a side by side comparison highlighting the differences for Solana and Ethereum.
I often see comments on how Solana’s hardware costs significantly more than Ethereum’s (this is true). However, what is often overshadowed is the amount of $SOL a validator actually requires to be profitable. The reason why the profitability threshold for Solana is so high is because their validators have to pay a “voting fee” which comes out to approximately 1.1 SOL/day (see documentation).
For those interested in the breakdown, each Solana epoch has 432,000 blocks which need to be voted on and each vote transaction costs 0.000005 SOL, which ends up being 2.16 SOL per epoch. Given that epochs currently take between 2 to 2.5 days, in a year, that amounts to almost 400 SOL.
So every Solana validator needs to pay about 400 SOL/year in voting fees. That’s why the Solana Foundation even offers subsidizing part of the voting fees for the first year (see screenshot).
Don’t have almost $1M in $SOL? No worries, you can still run a Solana validator without any of your own SOL, you just need to convince the community to delegate 55,000-75,000 SOL ($9M-12M) to you. @toly says you just need to “hustle”.
Now the Ethereum community knows that while 32 ETH ($86K) is much lower than $935K, it’s still a considerable amount of money. Which is why multiple tools were built that allowed for anyone that wishes to participate to run a full Ethereum validator with only a few ETH. Examples include an 8 ETH @Rocket_Pool node, or a 2.4 ETH @LidoFinance CSM node. Or you can use any amount of ETH to run a DVT node via @squadstaking.
One chain was designed and built for maximum decentralization, while the other was built as a centralized datacenter chain that only well funded VCs can participate in. There is a reason why institutions continue to focus building on Ethereum.
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