What is the delegate’s identity and background?
With a background in web dev, SaaS + SEO, I founded Solana Compass in September 2021, running a popular website and validator. The site has always had a strong focus on staking, offering guides to users and a wealth of data on Solana’s staking ecosystem.
Dashboards are offered on staking flows and changes, showing who stakes where and in what quantities, and I record a wide range of statistics on validator and stake pool performance, as well as their impact on the network. Building these reports has given me an understanding of what is working well in the ecosystem and the challenges faced for stakers and validators alike.
Has the delegate historically contributed to the Jito Network?
Solana Compass has run the Jito client since November 2022, I believe within the first 20-30 validators to do so. Additionally the Solana Compass website refers 100s of stakers to the Jito website each month
Has the delegate historically been involved in protocol governance?
Over the past 3 years I’ve been involved in governance and gauge based voting on Mango, Marinade, Blaze and Saber DAOs, as well as participating in a wide variety of discord discussions. I’ve also been part of some early discussions on Solana validator governance
Is the delegate committed to helping the Jito Network and Solana succeed? Explain.
When I started as a validator network spam was one of the biggest issues affecting Solana’s future, the cause of both downtimes and degraded performance. I fully support Jito’s goals in bringing order to the chaos of MEV, reducing the burden of automated spam by creating a path for fair competition between arbitrageurs. In more recent months I’m keenly aware of the benefits Jito brings validators by making their businesses more sustainable and economically viable, helping them upgrade servers, improve operations and reliability.
Candidate views
How should JitoSOL validator delegation balance performance (yield) versus decentralization goals?
We all know that the biggest influencing factor for stakers is APY: how much yield do I get from pool A vs pool B?
Yet the other key reason stakers delegate to pools and not individual validators is they wish to delegate their responsibility to choose a validator to experts. Not every staker is an expert in what makes a good validator, nor wishes to be. Therefore I feel Jito has a responsibility to make choices that stakers may not have considered or prioritised in order to protect the health of the network and thus the stake they are custodians of.
Ultimately the reason decentralization is so important is that a failure could put the entire network at risk. Similarly, exclusively optimizing for yield above all else can also put the network at risk, as there will always be some validators who will aggressively compete by modifying their clients, potentially breaking consensus and putting network uptime and stability at risk. Furthermore, supporting validators by ensuring they receive a fair fee for their work helps them become better custodians of the network, for example by investing in extra redundancy, or by hosting in less centralized geos, where hardware or bandwidth may be more expensive.
I believe that as the home of MEV Jito already has a natural advantage when it comes to yield: stakers already understand that Jito’s technology is unlocking additional yield for their stake. This understanding means that Jito doesn’t necessarily need to compete on APY alone, but can select validators that can provide sustainable, secure yield over the long term, rather than short term hacks for a few extra bps or yield.
What should be the priorities for JTO liquidity mining and DAO token grants?
Liquidity mining is a great tool to acquire more stakers and can be necessary to ensure there is enough dex liquidity, but it can also be highly transient: if poorly balanced it can attract mercenary farmers who leave as soon as they get a better offer. It’s important to ensure emissions are highly targeted to the venues that offer the greatest benefits to Jito, and that global emissions are limited to a sustainable level
DAO token grants have the potential to be a significant lever in growing the Jito ecosystem by supporting new projects and initiatives to increase adoption and utility of JitoSOL. Smaller hackathon sponsorships etc could provide some interesting and unexpected use cases, however by setting clear criteria for the types of work Jito wishes to support, or writing RFPs for specific projects Jito wants to see in the ecosystem grants can be used much more efficiently
What are your goals for the DAO as a delegate?
I’d like to support Jito’s core goals in democratizing MEV and improving the health of the staking ecosystem. The Jito pool has become one of the largest LSTs on Solana, while the Jito client currently operates more than 50% of the stake weight on the network. With this growth comes a great deal of responsibility to guide the growth of Solana. I’d like to do what I can to support the DAO to make the right choices for the growth and development of both Jito and the Solana network as a whole.