Revenue & Performance

Measuring revenue-impacting elements of the validator

Skipped Leader Slots

APY

Income

Income for a validator is measured by epoch. Primary sources of income and expenses vary according to the table below:

Name / Description	Who pays it	When and how is paid
Commission: The percentage of inflation rewards collected by the validator from inflation (SOL created on every epoch) as commission for voting and securing the network.	Inflationary Rewards as part of a scheduled inflation rate that mints new SOL.	Per epoch. Rewards for epoch N are paid in the first block of epoch N + 1. Rewards depend on the inflation rate, the validator’s stake-weight (amount of SOL staked to the validator vs. total network stake), the TVC accrued in epoch N and the configured commission. Paid to the validator's vote account.
Transaction Fees (part of Leader Slot Rewards): 50% of all standard transaction fees in the block produced.	Users who submit transactions to the Solana network	Per block produced. Paid to the validator's identity account.
Priority Fees (part of Leader Slot Rewards): 100% of all priority (CU-based) fees in the transactions that were included in the block produced.	Users who submit transactions to the Solana network	Per block produced. Paid to the validator's account of identity.
Voting Fees: Also known as vote transaction fees, these are a small cost that validators pay to submit votes to the network as any other Solana transaction.	Every validator pays this to earn TVC.	Per block. Paid from the validator's identity account.
Voting Compensation: Offered by the SFDP, this initiative enables smaller or newer validators to remain financially sustainable by offsetting the cost of voting fees.	Solana Foundation through the SFDP	Per epoch. Paid to the validator's identity account.
Jito Rewards: Only applicable if you are running the Jito-Solana client, which enables MEV tip capture via the Jito Block Engine	Bots, searchers who want to front-run, back-run, or bundle transactions for arbitrage	Per block. Paid to the validator's identity account.

Leader Slot Rewards example

Let´s take for example slot 349075076 on mainnet-beta. The Hayek validator (with identity hykfH9jUQqe2yqv3VqVAK5AmMYqrmMWmdwDcbfsm6My) was assigned as leader in the leader schedule and it produced a block for which it was rewarded with 0.015671734 SOL which increased its SOL balance to 44.112034624 SOL, you can see this in the Solana explorer here:

The following are the transactions from blocks 349075076 and 349075077 where the identity account hykfH9jUQqe2yqv3VqVAK5AmMYqrmMWmdwDcbfsm6My participated. Leader slot rewards are also included:

Block	Index In Block	Transaction ID	Pre-Balance	Post-Balance	Balance Change	Block Reward	Description
349075076	273	4CbJFJdWeJxg5Ng1ZhKaz6iiEo6b4nK2u4mSXMQ9BSCr9cCdoWG2DSthbAnFt44c6pSjwrav4RSN7MsqhzkujJas	44098438050	44098433050	-5000	-	Validator vote: TowerSync
349075076	1443	5RgPSgiAcrztN9SkivtWeFWzDeerZb3UNQ2MaFvZqGZ2kfAAeS56GdJx3gLnLQdwwTYd9fm3v9XabnkCkCNcXrgE	44098433050	44096367890	-2065160	-	Jito: InitializeTipDistributionAccount
349075076	1444	4XDqZneXwuC68HU3TKapwDa4BQV6mxunxAX7DFUnNSp43d8ecY7y24tigbQ7R9nXexF7WEvPDi3JPM3Fi5kpnUgL	44096367890	44096362890	-5000	-	Jito: ChangeTipReceiver
349075076	-	-	44096362890	44112034624	15671734	15671734	Leaser Slot Rewards
349075077	18	659MYAXgWBeJUYS3Mi722QiN3prRX8rTCRcnBARap2PCsQiMRcR8DrNTTo5MoYGqyqmwgfgWeTh19gewehRCTNkU	44112034624	44112029624	-5000	-	Validator vote: TowerSync
349075077	-	-	44112029624	44124345405	12315781	12315781	Leaser Slot Rewards

As you can see, leaser slot rewards or block rewards are credited to the validator identity account at block level and not as part of a transaction.

You can use this command to get the block data including transactions and block rewards:

curl --location 'https://api.mainnet-beta.solana.com' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
    "id": 1,
    "method": "getBlock",
    "params": [
        349075076,
        {
            "encoding": "json",
            "maxSupportedTransactionVersion": 0,
            "transactionDetails": "full",
            "rewards": true
        }
    ]
}'

Timely Vote Credits (TVC)

Commission