# Chainflow X Jito StakeNet Twitter Space Q&A

**Stakenet**?

Stakenet is a self-sustaining protocol designed for Solana LSTs, comprising on-chain programs including the steward program, on-chain history program, and keeper bots. Operating on the Solana mainnet, Stakenet aims to assume complete management of Jito Sol. The steward program acts as the stakepool manager, determining the scoring of validators and facilitating dynamic stake management, including the movement of deposits and the handling of undelegating from underperforming validators each new epoch. The validator history program serves as an oracle or database, capable of storing three years of mainnet validators' data, encompassing historical performance, commission rates, IPs, and client types. Executing instructions permissionlessly, the keeper bots, open to anyone, perform essential operations every epoch to sustain the system, requiring only a small amount of SOL for maintenance.

**What is stakenet and its components?**

Stakenet, driven by the inspiration to enhance existing stakepool practices, aims to improve upon the centralized keypair structure prevalent in current staking models. The motivation stems from the recognition that stakeholders harbor substantial trust in the teams overseeing stake pools. To address this, Stakenet seeks to reconstruct the architecture, introducing full transparency from end to end. By doing so, the reliance on trusting core teams to manage stake pools is diminished, fostering increased trust in the stakepool itself. The project emphasizes improvements in security concerning stakepool operations, striving to minimize trust in how these pools are administered. This is achieved by putting governance on-chain and reducing the necessity for extensive human coordination. Stakenet's approach makes managing pools more accessible and inclusive.

**How should one use stakenet?**

In the near term, users should utilize Stakenet with a specific focus on the tailored operations of the Jito pool, allowing individuals to easily modify parameters for their own customized use. Although the Jito pool represents a distinct stakepool with its designed operational parameters, users have the flexibility to deploy their unique stakepools on the Stakenet platform. It is important to note the close association with the SPL implementation of stakepools, and while running stakepools outside this implementation might pose some challenges, it remains a viable option, contributing to overall improvements in decentralization.

**How does stakenet decentralize stake on Solana?**

Stakenet decentralizes stake on Solana by incorporating extensive contextual information about validators' activities and the software they run. The metadata of each validator is recorded on-chain, providing a transparent view. By modifying delegation algorithms, Stakenet empowers governance participants, giving them control over the stake pool. Physical decentralization is a crucial aspect, and Stakenet addresses this by highlighting the limitations of networks confined to a single data center, country, or cloud service. Exploring IP addresses, including latitude, longitude, and ASN information, becomes a critical factor in a decentralized context, presenting an intriguing engineering challenge with ample opportunities for further exploration in terms of decentralization.

**Does Stakenet do calculations currently or do you have to set that up?**

Stakenet is currently in the process of determining the code to calculate latitude and longitude, intending to subsequently upload this data onto the blockchain. Various aspects, such as missing ASN information, are under consideration, with the community actively exploring optimal methods for their incorporation. Governance plays a pivotal role, enabling the community to decide the priority of metadata extraction for stakepool focus. The engagement of the community is crucial as it empowers them to assess the riskiest components in the deployment of validators, thereby incentivizing or disincentivizing setups to enhance network security. This proactive approach allows for early identification and resolution of potential issues, promoting prevention over reaction, particularly in cases similar to Hetzner.

**Why is it important to have this info on chain?**

Stakenet, a project focused on enabling permissionless stakepool creation, emphasizes the importance of having comprehensive data on-chain to facilitate intelligent stake management. This data acts as an oracle for validator information, eliminating the necessity for other teams to create their separate validator offline databases or pipelines. By centralizing this critical information on-chain, Stakenet aims to streamline the process of stakepool setup, reducing costs and barriers for others seeking to establish their own stakepools. Jitosol had a lot of upfront costs that the team seeks to reduce for others.

**Why hasn’t this been done before? What were the challenges to get this info on chain?**

Solutions like the existing validators metrics, such as validators.app, were good enough for the first Solana defi wave but never looked at how fragile and nuanced things are when it comes to the crank or key pair. The team realized that LSTs are a critical enough point. Key pairs become a huge risk to the network if LSTs are a 30-40% share of total staked assets. This nuanced perspective on the fragility of the crank and key pair, along with the recognition of LSTs' significance, presents a previously unexplored challenge that teams may not have thoroughly considered in the earlier stages of Solana's development.

**What is cranking the stakepools and how are keepers involved?**

In the process of cranking stakepools, keepers play a crucial role, acting as bots responsible for executing permissionless instructions for both steward and validator history programs. These keepers are tasked with monitoring a myriad of metrics each epoch, including information from the vote account, number of epoch credits, MEV commission, gossip details, such as upgraded software versions, changing IP, and other various dynamic data points. This comprehensive tracking not only ensures redundancy but is also vital for initiating new validator accounts efficiently, demanding vigilant monitoring due to the permissionless nature of the operation.

**What is the concept of a steward?**

The concept of a steward involves serving as a manager or wrapper around the SPL program, enabling the execution of Cross-Program Invocations (CPIs). Stewards are responsible for monitoring and tracking poorly performing validators, taking corrective action such as undelegating when necessary. This oversight is consolidated within a comprehensive state machine managed by the steward, who assumes the role and risk associated with the keypair in the staking architecture. Notably, this keypair risk is mitigated by moving it to an on-chain account owned by the steward program, effectively replacing the risk associated with key storage on disk.

**Who would run stewards and keepers?**

Anyone who is interested in the decentralization of Jitosol and all other stakepools. Individuals can call any RPC node to access accounts and initiate updates. Keepers, responsible for submitting 10k transactions per epoch, require long-term incentivization strategies, The Jito foundation aims to run keepers of their own as well as help others wanting to get involved run their own Keeper bots. Running keepers could serve as a way for validators to further support the network, but it's also a lighter infrastructure option for those not running a validator. Possible funding from fee revenue generated by Jito Sol or Stakenet may be directed toward those running keepers, considering the associated operational costs. The team remains open to innovative ideas in this regard.

**What is on mainnet right now? What are key deployment milestones?**

On the Solana mainnet currently, there is the Validator History Program, observable at jito.network/stakenet, providing on-chain updates. Additionally, the Cluster History sits atop the Validator History, offering insights into total blocks created per epoch and high-level states. Key deployment milestones include ongoing testing of the scoring algorithm to prevent getting stuck in a bad state and causing mass unstaking. In Q1, the live deployment of the steward program is anticipated, followed shortly by configurability enabled by the DAO. This broader configurability aims for usability by other stakepools in the ecosystem. Notably, the open GitHub repository allows community participation, with open issues that would be good practice for those learning Anchor.

Interesting ideas for the deployment of the steward program involve transforming it into a customizable platform for users to tailor strategies. Perhaps initiatives can be set to include a competition to optimize stakepool characteristics like APY and decentralization. Explorations into determining the block quality of validators and quantifying and storing it in Stakenet are underway. Stakenet, extending beyond LSTs, seeks to decentralize algorithms that allocate resources across networks and node operators, with a vision to encompass other networks and use cases, contributing to the broader allocation control that Stakenet facilitates.

**How to get involved?**

It is currently pretty informal. You can contribute to discord convos, find/resolve github issues, eventually, things will be done through the governance process and you can use the Jito network forum for proposals.

**What are risks and benefits of stakenet being timeless?**

The concept of Stakenet being timeless brings the benefit of resilience, allowing Jito Sol to maintain a robust and healthy product even if the original development team were to disappear. This timeless approach aims for Jito Sol to serve as the bedrock of Solana DeFi. However, there are inherent risks, primarily the potential for slower reactions to changes in networks when moving away from a smaller and more agile team. These risks can be mitigated by establishing robust and decentralized governance and development operations, akin to the model implemented by Lido. Beyond its resilience, the timeless nature of the network contributes to self-healing capabilities, particularly in situations where validators may shut down or engage in undesirable activities.

**What are DAO roles for the Jito token holder?**

DAO members have the authority to upgrade Stakenet programs, and various parameters, including delegation patterns and strategies, can be proposed and updated through the DAO. This flexibility allows individuals interested in enhancing delegation patterns to engage with the DAO, contributing to the continuous improvement and evolution of the Stakenet ecosystem.

**Does fire dancer impact delegation strategy?**

Yes, in terms of decentralization.