Solana 's daily active validator count has dropped below 800 – a level last seen in 2021 – and is significantly lower than its peak of around 2,500 validators in early 2023. In less than three years, the number of validators has decreased by over 65%.
Validators are independent nodes running the Solana software to validate transactions and create Block. They participate in the proof-of- Stake consensus mechanism by Stake SOL and "voting" for Block to protect the network. As the number of validators decreases, so does the number of voted transactions: the number of transactions sent by validators to confirm Block has dropped from approximately 300,000 to 170,000 per day.
The level below 800 appeared last month and has remained around that level YTD .
The reason validators are leaving the network is believed to stem from changes in the "economic equation," particularly the time-limited support policies of the Solana Foundation Delegation Program, such as vote cost subsidies and the Stake-matching mechanism – which are designed to gradually decrease over time. As subsidies decrease, smaller validators struggle to cover vote fees and infrastructure costs without sufficient delegated Stake and revenue. To keep up with the network, validators must send thousands of transactions daily; if the amount of SOL Stake does not generate a return exceeding these costs, operating the node becomes financially unviable.
Despite the shrinking number of validators, the volume of non-vote transactions (user-generated transactions such as DEX trades, dApp interactions, and Token transfers) remains fairly stable around 100 million per day – indicating that activity on Solana is still thriving thanks to the recent memecoin boom.
The article "Number of validators on Solana plummets, number of vote transactions drops by 40%" first appeared on CoinMoi .
