How to Stake Solana: Native Staking Step by Step

What staking Solana means

When you stake SOL, you delegate it to a validator, an operator running the software that produces Solana's blocks. Delegation is non-custodial: the SOL moves into a stake account whose authority is your wallet, and the validator can never withdraw, move or spend it. It earns rewards on your behalf and takes a commission from them. Solana does not slash stake when a validator goes offline, so a badly run validator costs you reward, not principal. Staking does nothing against a fall in the SOL price.

There are three ways to do it. Native staking, covered here, keeps the keys and the stake account with you, and the only fee is the commission of a validator you pick. Liquid staking gives you a token that keeps earning while you use it elsewhere. Exchange staking is custodial: the exchange holds the SOL, sets its own cut and decides when you can withdraw. The APY guide compares what each pays.

What you need

• A non-custodial wallet. Solflare opens a native stake in its mobile app and on its website. Phantom opens one only in its browser extension. Its mobile app can show, unstake and withdraw a stake, but not create one.
• SOL in that wallet, sent from an exchange or bought in the wallet.
• A validator. Moving to another later costs one epoch's rewards, so the checks in how to choose a validator are worth doing first.

The 1 SOL minimum, and what it does not block

Each new delegation needs at least 1 SOL per stake account. On top of that the account holds a rent-exempt reserve of 0.0017 SOL, returned when you close it, and every transaction takes a fee from your wallet balance. Stake a little less than your whole balance so the fees have something to come from.

The stake program checks the minimum only when you delegate or split. A stake account that already holds less than 1 SOL keeps earning, and two such accounts can be merged even if the result stays under 1 SOL. What you cannot do is open a new delegation below the minimum, or split off a piece that would leave either side under it.

Solana staking at a glance

How to stake SOL, step by step

1. Fund your wallet

   Send SOL from an exchange to your wallet address, or buy it in the wallet, and wait for it to arrive.

2. Open native staking

   Choose native staking rather than a liquid staking option, which swaps your SOL for a token. Where each wallet starts it is in the table below.

3. Choose a validator

   Check both of its fees, the commission on inflation rewards and the one on MEV tips, because a wallet's list usually shows only the first. Validators name themselves, so compare the vote account address with the one in the validator ranking before you confirm.

4. Enter an amount and delegate

   Type at least 1 SOL and approve. The wallet creates a stake account and delegates it in one transaction, signed with your own key.

5. Let it activate

   The stake account appears straight away as activating. It becomes active at the next epoch boundary and earns through the epoch after that, and every reward from then on is added to the stake.

Wallet	Where native staking starts	Opens a new stake in
Phantom	Solana in the token list, then More, Stake SOL, Native Staking	Browser extension only
Solflare	Staking tab, then Stake	Mobile app and website

Staking with a Ledger

Add the Ledger in the wallet's account menu, with the Solana app open on the device. In Phantom that again means the browser extension. You then stake exactly as above and approve each transaction on the Ledger. The stake account's authority is the Ledger key, so a compromised computer cannot move the SOL on its own.

What happens after you delegate

Solana time is measured in epochs, each ~26 hours. Stake delegated during an epoch earns nothing in that epoch: it goes active at the next boundary, earns through the epoch after that, and the reward is credited when that epoch closes. So the first payout is never less than one epoch away and never more than two, about 26 to 52 hours, depending on how far into the current epoch you delegate. Epoch 1077 is 16% through, so delegating now would put your first reward about 48 hours away. From then on rewards arrive at every epoch boundary and go straight into the stake account, so the balance compounds with no action from you.

The rate moves with how much SOL is staked across the network, and from one epoch to the next it also swings by chance, more for a small validator than for a large one. Where the yield comes from is in Solana staking rewards and APY explained.

Staking more later

A stake account cannot be topped up. Staking more opens a second account, with its own 1 SOL minimum and its own reserve. Two accounts delegated from the same wallet to the same validator can be merged into one, once both are fully active or while both are still activating in the same epoch. The stake program allows it, though not every wallet has a button for it. To spread stake across several validators, open one account for each.

Fees, commission and choosing a validator

Two kinds of cost reach you differently. The transaction fee comes out of your wallet balance each time you stake, unstake or withdraw: the protocol charges 5,000 lamports (0.000005 SOL) per signature, and wallets may add a small priority fee on top. The commissions come out of rewards before you receive them.

There are two commissions. The first is taken from your inflation rewards: the median across the 661 validators active this epoch is 5%, so a 5% commission leaves you 95% of that stream. The second is taken from MEV tips, which 91.2% of active validators collect through Jito, and it is set separately, which is why a headline 0% says nothing about your whole reward. Of the 210 validators charging nothing on inflation, 27 still keep a share of the tips. The validator ranking lists both side by side.

Performance matters less than it looks. Inflation rewards are paid on vote credits, but since Alpenglow how they fall between validators is mostly chance: a gap in one epoch does not repeat in the next, and it evens out over time. Uptime and skip rate only rule out an operator that has stopped working. How much you are paid is decided by the two commissions.

Stake.Cake charges 0% on inflation rewards and 0% on MEV. This epoch it held 100% uptime and a 0.0% skip rate.

How to unstake later

To get the SOL back, unstake (deactivate) the stake account. It still earns for the epoch in progress, the SOL becomes withdrawable when that epoch ends, and you then withdraw it to your wallet. There is no penalty and no fixed term, and Phantom's app can do this even though it cannot open a stake. The steps are in how to unstake Solana.

Staying safe

• Connect only on the wallet's own site. Type phantom.com or solflare.com yourself or use a bookmark, rather than following a link or an ad.
• Never share your seed phrase. No validator, wallet or support agent needs it, and staking never asks for it.
• Match the vote account, not the name. Operators choose their own display names, and nothing stops another validator from using a similar one.
• Never send SOL to stake it. Native staking signs a delegation from your wallet, so a site that asks you to transfer SOL to an address is not staking it.