Solana’s upcoming Alpenglow upgrade could mark a turning point for the network’s stake economy. CoinDesk sat down with Michael Repetny, CEO of Marinade Labs, the company that supports Solana’s liquid stake protocol Marinade, to discuss how the update aims to change the economics of running a validator on Solana, significantly lowering the barrier to entry.
As the Solana ecosystem prepares for an upgrade at the end of this year or in early 2026, Repetny shares his thoughts on how this shift can expand validator participation and improve decentralization even as higher hardware demands loom.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CoinDesk: Talk to me about the state of the Solana effort – what do you think are the most pressing issues right now in this area?
Michael Repetny: So when we started Marinade, there were 700 validators on Solana, with 11 of them big enough to potentially stop the network.
Then we launched Marinade in the first few years, the number of validators grew to 2000, so it was looking good. Right now we are under 1000 validators again active on Solana.
I think there are other signals [on the health of Solana staking]. Another way to look at it is if you look at the concentration of the bet, which is to say that if you get a third of the bet to shut down, Solana stops working.
Right now it takes about 20 of the biggest violators to do that, or it takes two countries, and it takes two data centers right now. It’s like different ways of looking at it. So it’s not ideal.
We’d rather see hundreds of bad quality validators than thousands of them with people just running potatoes.
And with the ETFs and with institutional interest, I think centralization becomes a bigger risk.
At Marinade, we try to ensure that we have a viable option for validators to bet responsibly.
Solana has a major upgrade coming called Alpenglow. How will it affect the staking ecosystem?
We’re hopeful, and that should affect the stake and validation economy. There is a proposed change to just cut the voting fees for validators (voting fees are incurred by validators when they vote on processing SOL on the blockchain). So this is a huge one, because right now if you want to run a validator, just to get started, you have to pay about $5,000 a month.
Of that $5,000, about $4,000 is spent on voting fees alone. So as you can see, 80% of the cost today to create your validator is voting fees. Alpenglow aims to make polling fees much lower. This is super exciting, and should make it much more accessible to start their own validator because the cost will come down
Will there be changes to Solana validation rewards?
One way to look at it is to reduce the cost of running a validator. Alpenglow is really about increasing bandwidth and reducing latency.
We hope to see more saturated blocks as we pack them better, which should also improve validators’ economics of packing the blocks.
Another benefit of it would be that if you increase the bandwidth and decrease the latency, then there is less time for arbitrage and malicious maximum extractable value (MEV). This means that if there is less time to manipulate the order of the transactions, less toxic and malicious MEV will happen, which is great for users.
Are there any tradeoffs for validators with Alpenglow?
Perhaps hardware costs may eventually increase. There may be a higher demand on the end validators to ensure they are still keeping up with the network as more transactions will be coming in. Perhaps with the more demands on them, there may be a trade-off. Other than that I don’t know. There will be problems, but we’ll see when we get there.
How does Alpenglow tie back into Marinade’s mission?
It makes it more accessible to create just more validators. The threshold for being break-even is much lower.
So Alpenglow is coming at the end of the year or maybe at the beginning of next year – will this be a really big transformation or just another upgrade? And where does Solana go after that?
It is one of the parts that needs to be fixed in order for Solana to be and remain competitive with things like Hyperliquid or decentralized exchanges.
Solana is working on fixing the protocol with Alpenglow, fixing the infrastructure with new projects like DoubleZero, fixing the software clients and optimizing Firedancer. All of these things, hopefully now, are all coming together.
A six-month time frame might not be enough for the results to show, but once it’s out there, it will hopefully unlock use cases that wouldn’t be available on Solana at the moment.
Hopefully there will be more economic activity, which should translate into more revenue, and hopefully that pie will grow.
Read more: Solana set for major overhaul after 98% vote to approve historic ‘Alpenglow’ upgrade
