I appreciate the effort you put into compiling and sharing this data.
We strongly recommend that the Marinade team and the Solana Foundation conduct their own investigation and understand which validators received stake without payment without malicious intent, and which ones, knowing this vulnerability, used it to enrich themselves, robbing stakers.
This statement in the spreadsheet also seems to reflect your own ethical judgment, which of course you’re free to make. That said, I’d like to offer my own perspective in response.
The responsibility we validators carry is quite straightforward: to deliver on our stated commission rate and to operate with near-100% uptime in order to provide the expected share of inflation rewards and MEV (and in some cases, block rewards if explicitly promised).
Even if Marinade has made promises to its users about the returns they can expect from SAM, we as validators are not accountable for fulfilling those promises. Designing a mechanism that properly collects and redistributes those returns is entirely Marinade’s responsibility.
If inefficiencies in that mechanism are preventing optimal returns—even though a better implementation could have captured more value—that still remains an issue between Marinade and its users.
In that light, framing the situation as “validators robbing stakers” is not only misplaced, but amounts to an unjustified attempt to shift blame.