Hi maxkaplan,
Thanks a lot for acknowledging our research.
Let me reiterate that our intent is not to publish some kind of public blacklist.
The purpose of this research is to highlight a systemic issue — and prompt Marinade, the broader community, and the Solana Foundation to conduct their own investigation and hold the responsible parties accountable.
We’re still finalizing the presentation of our findings and writing up the methodology so that anyone in the community can independently verify the numbers we’ve surfaced.
We’re focused on data, not judgment. We’re not trying to assess intent or motivation — just the outcome.
Regarding your validator:
We’ve observed that in most epochs your bid was below the MIN_effective_BID (our synthetic benchmark).
If that bid had stayed consistently low across all epochs — as if you had completely forgotten about Marinade and weren’t monitoring your delegation — that would be one thing.
But here’s what actually happened:
- In epoch 766, Marinade slashed most of your stake (from 108,687 SOL down to 1,585 SOL in epoch 767),
- And right after that — you immediately increased your bid from 0.01 to 0.75.
- This strongly suggests that you were actively monitoring both your delegation and your bid.
Then, after Marinade restored your stake to 125,352 SOL in epoch 771,
you lowered your bid right back down to 0.01.
Is this fair behavior? That’s not for us to decide.
But whether it’s appropriate for an SFDP validator to knowingly leverage a loophole in the auction mechanism —
that’s a question for the Solana Foundation to answer.