The $70,000 Bill Every Solana Validator Pays — and X1 Validators Never See

Every Solana validator pays to vote. One vote per slot at 5,000 lamports adds up to about 1.62 SOL a day, roughly $190 at today's $117 SOL, or close to $70,000 a year, before the node earns anything. On X1, which runs the same Solana Virtual Machine, that bill is zero. We sampled vote transactions from validators ranked 1st, 200th and 500th by stake. Every one paid a fee of 0.

This isn't a promotion or a bug. X1 wrote it into its client on purpose. The rest of this piece explains why, what it changes for a validator, and why X1 today looks less like "a cheaper Solana" and more like new land that few people have started farming.

Wait, Solana validators pay to vote?

Yes. On Solana a vote is an ordinary transaction. It carries a signature and pays the same 5,000-lamport base fee as any transfer. A healthy validator votes on nearly every slot, and slots currently arrive every ~266 ms, so the count piles up. That's about 325,000 votes a day.

We measured this directly. A mid-ranked Solana vote account sent 3.7 votes per second, which works out to 1.6 SOL a day. X1 Labs made the same calculation in its zero-cost votes documentation, back when SOL was $250. It found validators had to pay "approximately $8,600/month to participate in consensus, with 94% of this cost coming from voting fees."

Half of each fee is burned and half goes to the block leader. So a large validator wins some of the money back when it produces blocks, and a small one mostly doesn't. X1's docs spell out that imbalance: validators pay to support the network, "while top leaders profit from vote fees and block rewards, exacerbating centralization."

So how is it zero on X1?

X1's client, Tachyon, is rebased on Solana's Agave client, and X1 changed exactly this line item. Its validator rewards page puts it plainly: "validators on the X1 Blockchain don't pay for votes." The only direct cost left is hardware.

The docs also answer the usual objection: aren't vote fees there to stop spam? Votes only count when they carry stake, so spam votes change nothing, and attacking consensus still takes a third of all stake. X1 says removing the vote bill gives validators "a 40x increase in cost efficiency."

What does running an X1 validator actually cost, then?

It costs a server and nothing else. X1's hardware requirements are 12 cores / 24 threads at 3 GHz or faster, 192 GB RAM and 4 TB NVMe, on dedicated bare metal rather than a VPS. At mainstream providers that usually costs about $150 to $400 a month. That's roughly the vote bill a Solana validator pays in two days. X1's docs also say there is "no strict minimum amount of XNT required to run a validator."

Our step-by-step X1 validator guide covers both the official build from source and the X1 Console fast track. If you already run Agave, most of it will look familiar.

Where does the stake come from if nobody knows me?

This is the question that stops most new Solana operators, and it's where X1's second advantage comes in. The X1 Foundation runs an automated delegation program. At every epoch boundary (about 22 hours) it spreads Foundation stake across validators that pass its checks: commission at or below 10%, vote credits at least 92% of the cluster average, a competitive skip rate, and a minimum self-stake.

That self-stake bar is the P85 threshold introduced by Project Capybara, and it has risen again. It started at 1,000 XNT, went to 3,000 XNT in June, and is now 5,000 XNT, per the Foundation's delegation page. At today's $0.29 per XNT that is about $1,450 of your own stake. XNT's market cap is about $4.10M, and its fully diluted value (FDV) is about $311.5M, because most of the supply sits in Foundation, Labs and delegation-program stake. Both numbers matter when you price your self-stake.

You can check where any validator stands, including vote credits, skip rate, self-stake and the live leader map, at x1val.online. It is the dashboard X1's own docs link to. Today it lists 606 nodes and 578 block producers, with a 0.17% skip rate across the last 25 epochs.

"Fine, we pay to vote. But we also earn." So what do you earn on X1?

That's the right objection, and it deserves real numbers. We measured the median validator on each chain on September 22.

On Solana, the median validator has about 182,700 SOL staked with it, worth about $21 million, and charges 5% commission. Stakers earn about 5.25% a year, so its commission comes to about 480 SOL. Then come the two income sources Solana operators rightly point to. The leader keeps priority fees and half of each base fee: across 59 blocks we sampled, that averaged 0.0151 SOL per block, or about 750 SOL a year for this validator's share of leader slots. MEV tips through Jito add up to about 305 SOL at that stake, depending on how much the validator passes on to its stakers. Subtract the 593 SOL vote bill and the typical Solana validator clears roughly 640 to 940 SOL a year, about $75,000 to $110,000, before paying for its server. That's a good business, and there's no point pretending otherwise.

The catch is how you get there. Those fees and tips are paid in proportion to stake, and the vote bill isn't. Divide the median validator's revenue by its stake and each staked SOL earns the operator about 0.84% a year. So a Solana validator needs about 70,000 SOL of other people's stake, roughly $8.3 million, just to cover its vote bill. Until it gets there, it loses money every day it runs. The median validator you're comparing yourself to has already cleared that bar.

On X1, there is no bar. The Foundation's delegation program is delegating 322.7 million XNT right now, about 1.06 million XNT to each qualifying validator. It asks for 5,000 XNT of your own stake and a commission of 10% or less. The Foundation doesn't charge that 10%: you keep up to 10% of the rewards its stake earns, and its pool keeps the rest. At X1's 6.8% staking yield, that commission is worth about 7,100 XNT a year. Your own 5,000 XNT earns about 340 XNT more, and if you meet the bootstrap bonus criteria you get an extra 16% a year on up to 10,000 XNT of self-stake, another 800 XNT at 5,000. That adds up to about 8,200 XNT a year, roughly $2,400, and the vote bill takes none of it.

That's far less than $100,000. Compare what each chain asks you to put up first, though. On Solana, you have to attract about $8.3 million of stake before voting stops costing you money. On X1, you put up about $1,450 of your own XNT and run a good node, and you're earning from the first epoch. Per dollar you have to put in yourself, X1 is by far the better deal.

The biggest difference is block fees. On X1 they average 0.000009 XNT per block today, which is effectively nothing. That isn't a weakness in the design. It shows how early X1 is, because on any SVM chain the block producers collect those fees. Solana's validators earn 750 SOL a year from them because apps filled Solana's blocks. Nobody has filled X1's yet, and validators who are already producing blocks when the apps arrive will be the ones collecting.

Solana is also the proof that this can happen. Its blocks were once nearly empty too, and the same SVM stack it runs now pays its median validator about 750 SOL a year in fees alone. X1 runs that same stack and can follow the same path. Running a validator on a quiet chain is the risk today, and it is exactly the risk that could turn into the reward.

One caveat: X1 revenue is paid in XNT, so its dollar value moves with the XNT price. XNT's market cap is about $4.10M and its fully diluted value about $311.5M. Whatever the price, though, a Solana validator starts by paying a toll, and an X1 validator starts by earning.

Why is a quiet chain the opportunity?

When Columbus's ships reached land in 1492, what mattered wasn't that the new world was crowded. It wasn't. The soil was there, waiting to be populated and utilized. X1 is a small version of that.

Over the last hour, Solana processed about 1,544 non-vote transactions a second. X1 processed about 3.7. On X1, 99.8% of all transactions are votes, and all of those votes are free. The chain is built, secured and paid for, and most of its capacity is unused.

For the builders who would bring the traffic, the ground is ready. Squads v4, Metaplex Core and Token-2022 already run on X1 at the same program addresses as on Solana. A token account costs about $0.0006 in rent on X1 versus about $0.17 on Solana. But whole categories are still empty: X1's ecosystem directory lists no lending market or perps venue, and Pyth isn't deployed at its Solana address. On Solana, the teams that got into those categories early now own them. On X1, they are still unclaimed.

You don't have to take our word for what's already planted. X1 Labs' own next.x1.xyz pitches the chain directly to Solana developers: "Deploy the app you already wrote for Solana." You point your RPC at rpc.mainnet.x1.xyz, ship the same program, and get Theo, an AI copilot connected to live X1 data, plus a builders group where the core team helps you ship. Our X1 official links page lists every live X1 app, from XDEX and the Warp bridge to X1NS, launchpads and NFT markets. Look at what's there, then look at the gaps. The rails, the wallets and the bridge are already in place. What X1 still needs is the lending market, the perps venue and the oracle. Whoever builds them first will have them to themselves.

A validator that joins now is part of what makes that ground worth building on. It is also first in line for the block fees once apps arrive.

Won't Alpenglow make this moot?

This is the open question. Solana is replacing its consensus with Alpenglow (SIMD-0326). Under it, votes are no longer on-chain transactions. Validators send them directly to each other and aggregate them into certificates. Finality drops from around 8 to 13 seconds today to roughly 100–150 ms. Solana governance approved it with 98.27% of the vote in September 2025, and Agave v4.3 tentatively targets September 28 to begin activation.

So Solana is dropping vote fees too? Not quite. Alpenglow brings in a Validator Admission Ticket (SIMD-0357): a flat 1.6 SOL per epoch per validator, burned, with the active set capped at the top 2,000 by stake. Solana epochs currently last about 32 hours, so that's about 1.2 SOL a day, around $140 at today's price. The bill changes form, but a Solana validator still pays it.

That leaves X1 with a real choice. Alpenglow's SIMD calls it "incompatible" with the old consensus: it replaces TowerBFT entirely. If X1 follows Solana, it gets sub-second finality with upstream doing the maintenance. It would also be able to set its own admission ticket, and it could keep its no-fee principle by setting it very low. If X1 stays on TowerBFT, its votes stay free, but finality stays at about 11 seconds and X1 maintains that consensus alone.

X1 Labs hasn't said publicly which way Tachyon will go. It's the biggest question over X1's validator economics in the year ahead, and we will report the answer here.

The short version

A Solana validator pays about $190 a day just to vote. An X1 validator pays nothing, because X1 decided votes shouldn't be taxed. On Solana, the big fee and MEV income arrives only after you've attracted about $8 million of stake. On X1, the Foundation puts about a million XNT behind a validator with $1,450 of its own on the line, and the block fees are still waiting for the apps that will fill X1's blocks. If you already run Agave, you're a server and an afternoon away. Start with the official validator setup, then check your standing on x1val.online.

Methodology: vote fees were read on September 22, 2026 from getTransaction on sampled vote accounts at rpc.mainnet.x1.xyz and api.mainnet-beta.solana.com. Slot times and transaction rates come from getRecentPerformanceSamples (60 minutes), inflation from getInflationRate, and median stake and commission from getVoteAccounts. Block fee income is the average leader fee reward over sampled blocks (59 on Solana, 60 on X1), and MEV is Jito's reported network total for epoch 1039, split by stake share. Delegation figures are from delegation.mainnet.x1.xyz. SOL price $117.26, XNT $0.29.

Disclosure: X1 Report is run by an X1 node operator who holds XNT. See our editorial standards.