Alpenglow

How stake is allocated

• A performance cohort carries the weight. 15 validators, chosen purely on merit: the top named validators by vote credits, discounted by skip rate over the trailing 5 epochs. They are water-filled to the same total stake with at least a quarter of every epoch's stake, and with everything the community cohort does not need once that tier is at target, up to 100,000 SOL each. More than 15% of leader slots skipped disqualifies. Seats are sticky: one opens only on prolonged delinquency, a lost name, a failed skip gate or outside favouritism, and the next-ranked validator takes it.
• A community cohort is served first. Operators who give the cluster something beyond running their own node, whether public infrastructure such as an explorer or RPC, tooling, or nodes in under-served regions, are held at a fixed total-stake target, currently 300,000 to 600,000 SOL, set per member according to what they run: a single node carries the higher figure, an operator running two carries the lower one on each. Measured across every source, so the pool only makes up whatever the rest leaves short, and a member already at its target receives nothing. Within the cohort the member furthest from its own target is served first, measured as a share of that target so a two-node operator is compared fairly against a single-node one. The tier is capped at 75% of any one epoch's stake and a single member at 50%, so climbing to a new target never starves the merit cohort. A member that stops voting keeps the stake it holds and receives nothing further until it is producing votes again. The pool operator's own validator is an ordinary member of this cohort, on the same target, the same queue and the same rules as everyone else in it, and takes no merit seat.
• Every other named validator holds a flat 25,000 SOL from the pool. This tier is topped up before the others, so while the community cohort is still short of its targets it is capped at 25% of any one epoch's stake, and the cap lifts once that cohort is at target.
• No name, no stake. A validator without an on-chain validator-info name is capped at 1,000 SOL until it publishes one. Names are read every epoch.
• No co-funding favouritism. A validator that draws more than 100,000 SOL from another stake pool on this cluster is removed from agPIGS, and readmitted once it drops back under. The community cohort above is exempt.
• Newcomers are found automatically. A validator that appears in gossip with zero stake is seeded at its tier within minutes. No application, no contact needed.
• Patient with restarts. Stake is pulled only after 2 consecutive delinquent epochs, never for a brief outage.
• Survives regenesis. The pool recreates itself at the same addresses after every cluster reset.

Running a validator on Alpenglow? Publish a name, keep it voting, produce your blocks, and the pool will find you.