Solana Staking Index (SSI)

The Solana Staking Index (SSI) is an open-source, protocol-neutral benchmark that tracks the baseline native staking yield of the Solana network. It is calculated every epoch (roughly two days) from on-chain data, combining SOL issuance and block rewards (priority fees and base fees). It excludes MEV tips and does not deduct validator commission or platform fees, so it represents the gross baseline yield the network pays before costs. As of epoch 1007, SSI stands at 5.82 percent annualized, made up of 5.24 percent issuance and 0.58 percent block rewards. Launched in February 2026 by a coalition of Solana ecosystem operators, SSI gives stakers, protocols, and institutions a single, verifiable number to measure staking performance against. It draws direct inspiration from traditional finance reference rates like SOFR and the Fed Funds Rate, and it is published as a live Pyth Network oracle feed on Solana mainnet.

What is the Solana Staking Index in simple terms

SSI is a reference rate for Solana staking. Think of it as the network's baseline interest rate. Before SSI, there was no standardized, on-chain measure of what the Solana network actually pays to stakers at the protocol level. Individual validators, liquid staking tokens (LSTs), and dashboards each reported their own APY figures using their own methods, which made apples-to-apples comparison difficult.

SSI fixes that by publishing one transparent number derived from public blockchain data. It represents the theoretical best-case native yield: what a staker would earn running their own validator at zero commission, before operational costs. Because commission and platform fees are not subtracted, SSI is a gross rate. Any real staker will earn slightly less after fees, which is exactly what makes SSI useful as a benchmark. You measure your actual return against the baseline to see how much yield your validator or LST is keeping or losing.

The index was built as a public good rather than a commercial product. The methodology is open source, so anyone can verify how the number is produced. As Michael Repetny, co-founder and CEO of Marinade Finance, put it: "Solana staking has grown into a multi-billion dollar economy, but until now there's been no standardized way to measure what the network's baseline staking yield actually is. SSI changes that. It gives stakers, protocols, and institutions a single, transparent number to benchmark against, and it's built entirely on verifiable on-chain data."

Why did Solana need a benchmark staking rate

Solana staking became a large economy without a standard yardstick. As of mid-2026, roughly 430 million SOL is staked, about 68 percent of eligible supply and worth roughly 31 billion dollars, according to StakingRewards and SolanaCompass data. That is among the highest staking participation rates of any major proof-of-stake network. Yet there was no equivalent of a reference interest rate to price it against.

Traditional finance shows why this matters. For decades, LIBOR was the world's most widely used interest rate benchmark, underpinning roughly 350 to 400 trillion dollars in financial contracts at its peak. It was built on survey submissions from a panel of banks estimating what they thought they could borrow at, not on real transactions. Between 2012 and 2015, investigations revealed that panel banks had systematically manipulated their LIBOR submissions to benefit their own trading positions. Global banks paid more than 9 billion dollars in regulatory fines, with Deutsche Bank's April 2015 settlement of roughly 2.5 billion dollars the largest single penalty.

Regulators replaced LIBOR with the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR). The key difference is that SOFR is transaction-based. It is calculated from a very large volume of actual overnight Treasury repo trades each day, on the order of several trillion dollars in daily volume, which makes it far harder to manipulate. USD LIBOR panels ceased on June 30, 2023, and SOFR now serves as the primary US dollar benchmark. The Fed Funds Rate plays a similar economy-wide reference role for overnight bank lending.

This history is the credibility argument for SSI. A benchmark should be based on verifiable transaction data, not self-reported estimates. SSI is computed entirely from on-chain data, which is public and auditable by design. That makes it manipulation-resistant in the same way SOFR is, and it is why an on-chain, transaction-based staking benchmark is the right model for a blockchain economy.

The size of the opportunity is also worth stating plainly. Reference rates underpin the largest markets in the world. LIBOR alone anchored roughly 400 trillion dollars in notional contracts, and staking rates are the crypto-native equivalent of those interest rates. Solana lacked its version of that anchor until SSI.

How CESR proved the model on Ethereum

Ethereum already has a working example of what a staking benchmark makes possible. The Composite Ether Staking Rate (CESR) is a daily benchmark representing the mean annualized staking yield of the Ethereum validator population. It was launched on September 16, 2023 by CoinDesk Indices in partnership with CoinFund, is administered by Quatrefoil, and is calculated by CoinDesk Indices. CESR captures consensus rewards and priority transaction fees and accounts for deposits, withdrawals, and slashing.

The most important proof point came in March 2024, when FalconX completed the first fixed-for-floating interest rate swap on Ethereum staking yields using CESR. Investment firms Multicoin Capital and Parataxis Capital participated in the inaugural transaction. The swap let institutions lock in a fixed staking return or take a view on where staking yields would move, exactly the kind of risk management tool that interest rate swaps provide in traditional markets. FalconX framed it as bringing the large interest rate swap market to the crypto asset class.

CESR then became connected infrastructure. Rho Labs launched staking-rate futures referencing CESR. Chainproof, working with a regulated insurer, offered staking insurance that tops up yield if a validator underperforms the CESR benchmark. RedStone published a CESR oracle feed on Ethereum so builders could read the rate on-chain. Treehouse added CESR to its Decentralized Offered Rates platform, and Lukka distributed it to institutional data clients. Other named participants across CESR-linked products have included Dexponent, Northstake, TwinStake, Nonco, and Bastion Trading.

What CESR enabled on Ethereum is the playbook for what SSI can enable on Solana. First, establish a trusted, verifiable benchmark. Then swaps, futures, insurance, structured products, and yield curves can be built on top of it. One important distinction: CESR includes MEV in its rewards, while SSI deliberately excludes MEV tips. That is a methodological choice, explained below, and it reflects the different ways the two networks capture and report validator revenue.

How is the Solana Staking Index calculated

SSI is calculated once per epoch, roughly every two days, using on-chain RPC calls to derive SOL emissions and network block rewards. It combines two components.

The first is issuance, the inflation-based reward. This is the new SOL the protocol emits each epoch. The amount a staker earns from issuance is a function of the current network inflation rate and the ratio of actively staked SOL to circulating supply. When more SOL is staked, the same issuance is spread across more stake, which compresses per-staker yield. Solana's issuance follows a disinflationary schedule that started at roughly 8 percent in early 2021 and falls about 15 percent per year toward a long-term rate of 1.5 percent. At epoch 1007, issuance accounts for 5.24 percent of the 5.82 percent total.

The second is block rewards, which come from network transaction activity. These are priority fees, the optional extra payments users add to prioritize transactions, plus base fees, the minimum required cost of 5,000 lamports per signature. Block rewards rise and fall with real demand for blockspace, so this component ties SSI to genuine economic activity on Solana. At epoch 1007, block rewards contribute 0.58 percent.

The table below summarizes what SSI includes and excludes, and why.

The combination of these choices is what makes SSI a clean baseline. It captures every reward that the protocol itself pays, on-chain, to all stakers, and it leaves out the operator-specific variables that would make the number less comparable.

Why SSI excludes MEV tips

MEV tips are payments routed to validators through systems such as Jito for transaction ordering. SSI excludes them for three reasons:

1. They are not fully visible on-chain, so they cannot be measured with the same reliability as issuance and fees.
2. They vary widely from one validator to another, which would make a network-wide baseline noisy and less representative.
3. They are not an in-protocol reward, meaning they are not something the Solana protocol itself pays every staker.

Excluding MEV keeps SSI stable and comparable. A benchmark that swung with the MEV fortunes of a handful of validators would be a poor reference rate. This is the same logic SOFR follows in stripping out credit-risk premiums to produce a clean, near risk-free rate. Note that this is a genuine difference from Ethereum's CESR, which does include MEV. Readers comparing the two should not expect them to be constructed identically.

What makes SSI verifiable and manipulation-resistant

SSI is built entirely on on-chain data with an open-source methodology. Every input, issuance and block rewards, comes from public blockchain records that anyone can independently query and reproduce. There is no survey, no panel of self-reporting participants, and no discretionary adjustment. This is the core lesson of the LIBOR-to-SOFR transition applied to staking: a benchmark anchored to real, verifiable transactions is far harder to game than one based on estimates.

Because the code and method are public, the calculation can be audited by anyone. Protocols and institutions do not have to trust a single administrator's private process. That transparency is what allows SSI to function as a neutral public good rather than a proprietary product controlled by one company.

How SSI reflects Solana network activity

SSI moves with real demand for Solana blockspace, and a specific protocol change is why. On February 12, 2025, Solana activated SIMD-96, which routes 100 percent of priority fees to validators. Previously, priority fees were split 50/50, with half burned and half paid to validators. After SIMD-96, block rewards became a direct, undiluted signal of network demand, which is a large part of why SSI's block-reward component reflects genuine economic activity. The same change raised effective network inflation, since fewer tokens are now burned.

The January 2025 memecoin surge shows the dynamic in action. After the TRUMP token launched on January 17, 2025, followed by MELANIA the next day, Solana network fees spiked to a record of roughly 35 million dollars over the launch weekend, more than double typical levels, according to DeFiLlama data reported by CoinDesk. Priority fees dominated total fees during the frenzy, and the surge in block rewards pushed the effective staking rate sharply higher for that period. A benchmark like SSI captures these demand-driven yield changes as they happen, rather than reporting a static inflation-only number.

This is the deeper point about SSI. It is not only an inflation gauge. It is a live measure of the total baseline yield the network produces, including the portion that comes from people actually using Solana. At epoch 1007, the 0.58 percent block-reward component sits on top of 5.24 percent issuance for a 5.82 percent total. When Solana gets busier, that block-reward slice grows and the rate rises. When activity cools, it shrinks. The benchmark breathes with the network.

What SSI makes possible

A trusted benchmark is foundational infrastructure. Once it exists, a range of financial products and tools become feasible on Solana, following the path CESR opened on Ethereum.

Interest rate swaps on SOL staking yield are the clearest example. A validator, treasury, or fund could exchange a floating staking return for a fixed one, or take a position on the direction of yields, using SSI as the settlement rate. This mirrors the FalconX and CESR precedent directly. Fixed-rate staking products become possible for institutions that need predictable returns rather than a yield that changes every epoch. Validators could hedge against declines in block rewards. Prediction markets on network activity could settle against the block-reward component. Analysts could construct a Solana yield curve, treating staked SOL as an asset class with a term structure.

SSI is also a straightforward comparison tool. It provides a neutral reference for ranking validators, stake pools, and LSTs on how much of the baseline yield they actually deliver. For individual stakers, it is a transparency check: if your position is earning well below SSI, your validator or LST may be taking too much in fees or underperforming.

For institutions, a reference rate is often a prerequisite for deeper products. ETFs, structured products, and lending desks generally need a recognized benchmark to price and manage risk. Solana already has regulated price benchmarks used by spot ETFs, and a staking-rate benchmark extends that toolkit to yield-based products.

How stakers can use SSI today

SSI is usable now, not just a building block for future derivatives. The official site at solstakingindex.com offers a wallet lookup. You paste any Solana address and see the totality of that wallet's staking positions compared against the network-wide benchmark. This works read-only on public data, so no wallet connection or private key is required to check performance.

Stakers can also opt into email alerts that notify them when a chosen validator or LST begins to underperform the SSI rate. That turns the benchmark into a monitoring tool: you find out when your yield slips below the network baseline instead of discovering it epochs later. The site additionally maps Solana's historical issuance and block rewards, showing how the SSI rate has tracked against wider network economics over time.

For builders, SSI is live as a Pyth Network oracle feed on Solana mainnet. The feed publishes under the symbol Crypto.Index.SSI (Pyth Pro ID 3065, exponent -8, status stable) across the real-time, 50ms, 200ms, and 1-second channels. Any protocol can read the rate on-chain and reference it directly inside smart contracts, the same composability path that RedStone's CESR feed opened on Ethereum.

How SSI compares to other Solana staking rate measures

SSI is not the only attempt to measure Solana staking yield, but its construction is distinct. The main alternatives take different approaches.

CF Benchmarks publishes the CF SOL Staking Reward Rate (SOL_SRR). CF Benchmarks is authorized and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority as a benchmark administrator, and its staking indices are compliant with the UK Benchmarks Regulation. The CF methodology aggregates contributions from a set of institutional staking service providers and reports the rate net of provider fees. Compass Financial Technologies offers the STYSOL index, and Staking Rewards publishes its SOLSRB reward-rate benchmark.

SSI differs from these in four ways. Its scope is network-wide, derived from the whole network's on-chain issuance and block rewards, rather than a sample of selected staking providers. It is gross of fees, giving a theoretical baseline before commission, whereas CF reports net of provider fees. Its methodology is fully open source, so anyone can reproduce it, rather than an administrator's proprietary process. And it is Solana-native: the rate is published as a live Pyth oracle feed on mainnet, which makes it the only Solana staking benchmark that smart contracts can consume directly on-chain.

None of this makes the other benchmarks wrong. A regulated, net-of-fees provider index and an open-source, gross network baseline answer different questions. Institutions building regulated products may prefer an FCA-regulated administrator, while on-chain builders may prefer a verifiable, network-wide, protocol-neutral rate.

Who created the Solana Staking Index

SSI was co-developed by a coalition of Solana ecosystem organizations rather than any single company. The founding participants are Marinade Finance, DeFi Development Corp, Triton, Titan Analytics, stakefish, RevTec, Layer33, Chainflow, and QuickNode. It was released in February 2026. The coalition framed SSI explicitly as an ecosystem tool, which is central to its value. As the team stated, "We deliberately designed SSI to be protocol-neutral. This isn't any single protocol's product, it's an ecosystem tool. The more protocols and validators that adopt it as a benchmark, the more useful it becomes for everyone."

<!-- IMAGE: the "Supported by" participant logo strip (partner logos on dark background). Place here, right after the founding-participants paragraph. Provided by the SSI team; add alt text listing the nine organizations. -->

Additional ecosystem voices have backed the launch. Max Sherwood, founder of RevTec, anticipates that a widely accepted benchmark could open new use cases in Solana DeFi, including interest rate swaps, validator hedging tools, and prediction markets.

Adoption is where the benchmark's usefulness compounds. The more validators, LSTs, and protocols reference SSI, the more valuable it becomes as a shared standard. One early example of adoption comes from Marinade. In December 2025, the Marinade DAO approved MIP-18, which replaced a fixed performance fee with a conditional fee charged only when Marinade's staking APY exceeds the SSI benchmark. That is precisely the kind of use a neutral benchmark is meant to serve, and other ecosystem participants adopting SSI as a default reference would extend the same logic across Solana.

Frequently asked questions

Is SSI the same as Solana staking APY?

No. Most staking APY figures you see are net of commission and specific to one validator, LST, or platform. SSI is a network-wide, gross baseline before commission and platform fees. It represents the theoretical best-case yield the network pays, which you then compare your actual net APY against.

Does SSI include MEV rewards?

No. SSI deliberately excludes MEV tips. MEV is not fully visible on-chain, varies widely between validators, and is not an in-protocol reward. Excluding it keeps the benchmark stable and comparable across the whole network. This is a difference from Ethereum's CESR, which does include MEV.

What is the current Solana staking rate?

SSI stands at 5.82 percent annualized as of epoch 1007, made up of 5.24 percent issuance and 0.58 percent block rewards. The rate updates every epoch, roughly every two days, so check solstakingindex.com for the live figure.

Who calculates the Solana Staking Index?

SSI was co-developed by a coalition of Solana ecosystem organizations: Marinade Finance, DeFi Development Corp, Triton, Titan Analytics, stakefish, RevTec, Layer33, Chainflow, and QuickNode. It is calculated from on-chain data using an open-source methodology, so the result is reproducible by anyone rather than controlled by a single administrator.

Can I build on top of SSI?

Yes. SSI is open source and live as a Pyth Network oracle feed on Solana mainnet, published under the symbol Crypto.Index.SSI. Any protocol can read the rate on-chain and use it in smart contracts. The intended use cases include interest rate swaps, fixed-rate staking products, validator hedging, prediction markets, and yield-curve construction.

How often is SSI updated?

SSI is calculated once per epoch, which is roughly every two days on Solana. Each epoch's calculation uses on-chain RPC data for that period's issuance and block rewards. The Pyth feed pushes the value across real-time, 50ms, 200ms, and 1-second channels.

How is SSI different from CF Benchmarks or Staking Rewards?

CF Benchmarks publishes an FCA-regulated SOL staking reward rate based on a sample of institutional providers, reported net of fees. Staking Rewards and Compass publish their own reward-rate benchmarks. SSI is network-wide rather than a provider sample, gross of fees rather than net, fully open source, and readable on-chain via its Pyth mainnet feed.

Why does SSI leave commission and fees in the number?

Leaving fees in produces a neutral, theoretical baseline: what the network pays before anyone takes a cut. That is what makes it a useful reference. You measure your real, after-fee return against the gross baseline to see how much of the network's yield your validator or LST is actually passing through to you.