Identity and background
My name is Max Kaplan. In 2017, I joined Kraken as one of it’s first engineers. I ultimately led DevOps and Data engineering there for many years, helping Kraken scale.
In 2023, I got extremely bored of centralized exchanges, and decided to jump full time into Solana. I spent time at Edgevana where I created edgeSOL. edgeSOL was the first LST besides JitoSOL to also use stakenet for the underlying data for it’s algorithm. I also started Orangefin Ventures, which I ended up selling to SOL Strategies, where I am now the CTO.
I’ve been very active in the Jito forums here, which you can see from my post history. I have not involved in protocol governance before, however I have created protocols before.
I am very committed to helping Jito and Solana succeed. The latter is pretty straight forward given it’s the same mission of my current company, SOL Strategies. I believe Jito plays an extremely vital role in Solana’s success, especially as it’s biggest stake pool, and I think I can bring some unique perspectives and views to help Jito succeed.
Candidate views
As someone that has created a multi-validator stake pool before (although clearly smaller than JitoSOL), and also someone that runs a validator, I think I have some unique views here.
I strongly believe that a stake pool needs to optimize for stakers first over validators. By optimizing for stakers, you also optimize for validators. Validators don’t care about stake pools that don’t have any stake, they care about pools that have a lot of stake. Therefore, if you optimize for stakers, in many ways, you also optimize for validators.
I think yield is extremely important, and more important than decentralization, however I DO NOT think it is worth it to optimize for being the highest yield. Jito’s yield needs to be close to it’s competitors, and I feel that is very important. I do think that Jito has a responsibility to do what is best for Solana, and decentralization is important. However, decentralization has many facets. Geographic distribution is one, but I also would argue that Jito is the most decentralized LST due to stakenet, having the most validators in the set, and more. I would personally like to see Jito encourage some more geographic decentralization as well.
I would like to see JTO to continue to have the same high liquidity that it is over it’s competitors as well as helping funding research in the community such as (but not fully inclusive) stopping sandwich attacks.
My goal as a delegate would be to bring unique view points from someone who has worked at a centralized exchange, a validator, an LST operator, and from someone who works at Solana’s first publicly traded company.
Solana delegation address: CPsqVm78yV7Zi6QuwtDjhcbpASorW3xBnKey47zuPiQn