Solana’s upcoming Alpenglow update could mark a turning point for the network’s betting economy. CoinDesk sat down with Michael Repetny, CEO of Marinade Labs, the company behind Solana’s Marinade liquid staking protocol, 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 later this year or early 2026, Repetny shares his thoughts on how this change could expand validator participation and improve decentralization, even as greater hardware demands loom.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CoinDesk: Tell me about the status of Solana staking. What, in your opinion, are the most pressing problems at the moment in this area?
Michael Repetny: So when we started Marinade, there were 700 validators on Solana, 11 of them large enough to potentially stop the network.
Then we launched Marinade within the first few years, the number of validators grew to 2000, so it seemed fantastic. Right now we are back below 1000 active validators on Solana.
I think there are other signs [on the health of Solana staking]. Another way to look at it is if we look at the concentration of participation, that is, if you manage to close a third of that participation, Solana stops working.
Right now you need about 20 of the biggest offenders to do that, or you also need two countries and two data centers right now. Those are like different ways of looking at it. So, it’s not ideal.
We’d rather see hundreds of poor quality validators than thousands of them with people just running potatoes.
And with ETFs and with institutional interest I think centralization is becoming a bigger risk.
At Marinade, we are trying to ensure we have a viable option for validators to stake responsibly.
Solana has a major update called Alpenglow. How will it affect the betting ecosystem?
We are hopeful and this should affect the economics of staking and validators. There is a proposed change to simply reduce voting fees for validators (validators incur voting fees when they vote on SOL processing on the blockchain). So this is a huge problem, 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. As you can see, 80% of the current cost to get your validator up and running is voting fees. Alpenglow aims to greatly reduce voting rates. This is very interesting and should make it much more affordable to start your own validator because the cost will go down.
Will there be any changes to Solana validator 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 expect to see more saturated blocks when we package them better, which should also improve the economics of validators when packaging blocks.
Another benefit of this would be that if you increase bandwidth and reduce latency, there will be a shorter time to arbitration and malicious maximum extractable value (MEV). This means that if there is less time to manipulate the order of transactions, less toxic and malicious MEVs will be produced, which is great for users.
Are there compensations for validators with Alpenglow?
Maybe eventually the cost of hardware will increase. There may be a higher requirement for end validators to ensure they still keep up with the network as more transactions will come in. Maybe with more requirements for them, there could be a trade-off. Other than that, I don’t know. There will be problems, but we have to see once we get there.
How does Alpenglow relate to Marinade’s mission?
Makes it more accessible to activate more validators. The threshold for breaking even is much lower.
So Alpenglow will arrive at the end of the year or maybe early next year. Will this be a really big transformation or just another update? And where does Solana go after that?
It’s one of the pieces that needs to be resolved for Solana to be and remain competitive with things like Hyperliquid or decentralized exchanges.
Solana is working to fix the protocol with Alpenglow, fix the infrastructure with new projects like DoubleZero, fix the software clients, and optimize Firedancer. All of those things, hopefully now, are coming together.
A six-month period may not be long enough for results to show, but once available, it is expected to unlock use cases that would not be available in Solana today.
Hopefully, there will be more economic activity, which should translate into more income, and hopefully that pie will grow.
Read more: Solana prepares for major overhaul after 98% of votes approve historic ‘Alpenglow’ update
