Originally published on xroot.dev.
For as long as Solana has had staking, the minimum you could delegate has been one lamport — a billionth of a SOL. It is why the network has tens of thousands of stake accounts holding a few thousandths of a SOL: airdropped stake, split leftovers, test delegations that were never cleaned up. Each one is a full account the runtime tracks and rewards, and each one costs more to process than it earns.
That ended on 18 June 2026, when version 5 of the stake program activated on mainnet. The minimum delegation is now 1 SOL. And the reason that change can ship as a program upgrade rather than a validator release is the quieter story underneath it: the stake program is no longer native code inside the validator. It is on-chain bytecode, and it is upgradeable.
The Stake Program Is Now a Program
For most of Solana's life the stake program was a builtin: Rust compiled into the validator binary, changed only when validators upgraded. Over the past year the core programs were migrated one by one to Core BPF — real on-chain programs under the upgradeable loader — and the stake program's migration is complete. The validator ships version 5.1.0 of it as a 212 KB binary, and every feature ID in the migration table is now "none", which is the source's way of saying the migration is live on every cluster.
Changes to staking rules are now program upgrades gated by features, not validator releases. SIMD-0490 is the first substantive one.
The Rule
The runtime's minimum-delegation function has exactly two branches:
v5 stake program gate active — 1 SOL
Otherwise — 1 lamport
Minimum balance of a delegated account — rent-exempt reserve + minimum delegation
A stake account is 200 bytes; at today's rent rate of 5,080 lamports per byte, in force since 11 September 2026, its reserve is 0.00166624 SOL. So a delegated stake account needs a shade over 1.0017 SOL in it to be valid.
What the rule does to delegations that already exist below the minimum, read from the v5 program source: nothing. The minimum is enforced when stake is delegated, split or moved. A new delegation below 1 SOL is rejected; a split must leave both sides at or above the minimum unless the whole stake moves; a move-stake must leave both sides at or above it. Deactivate, withdraw and merge carry no minimum check, and the proposal says merging is always allowed even when the result stays below 1 SOL. An existing sub-1-SOL delegation keeps earning. It cannot be split or moved, only merged, deactivated or withdrawn.
Who Has Sub-1-SOL Stake Without Knowing
More people than you would think.
- Anyone who received staked SOL through a distribution program. Grants, airdrops and vesting schemes commonly delivered stake accounts in small tranches; the leftovers are often below 1 SOL.
- Anyone who split a stake account to move part of it. Splits leave a remainder, and remainders are forgotten.
- Anyone who tested staking once with a small amount and moved on.
Liquid-staking users generally do not have this problem; the pool's accounts are large. Direct stakers do.
The Three Instructions That Fix It
The stake program has always had what is needed; the gate just gives a reason to use it.
- Merge. Two stake accounts delegated to the same validator, with compatible state, can be merged into one. Small tranches on the same validator become one account above the minimum.
- Withdraw. A deactivated stake account, or the inactive portion of an active one, can be withdrawn to your wallet. Dust that is not worth merging is worth withdrawing, and the account's rent comes back with it.
- Deactivate delinquent. A separate case: stake delegated to a validator that has stopped voting for a long time can be deactivated by anyone — the instruction is permissionless. Stake stuck on a dead validator is not lost; it is waiting for someone to send one instruction.
Every one of these is a transaction your own wallet signs with the stake or withdraw authority. No custody, no third party.
What the Rest of the Ecosystem Has to Change
Stake pools, dashboards and any tool that creates stake accounts programmatically need to enforce the new minimum at creation time, or their users will get a confusing rejection from the program. Explorers that display "stake activation" for tiny accounts will need to decide what to show for accounts below the floor. And the getStakeMinimumDelegation RPC call, which many tools ignore because the answer used to be 1 lamport, now returns 1 SOL.
The Alpenglow admission changes ride a separate gate, and that gate had not activated on mainnet as of 17 September 2026. The stake-account side of staking has already changed; the vote-account side has not.
Minimum Delegation: Questions People Actually Ask
What is the minimum stake delegation on Solana?
One SOL. The v5 stake program gate activated on mainnet on 18 June 2026, at epoch 989; before that it was one lamport. A delegated stake account must hold the rent-exempt reserve plus that minimum.
Why can Solana staking rules change without a validator upgrade?
The stake program is now Core BPF: on-chain, upgradeable bytecode under the upgradeable loader. Rule changes arrive as feature-gated program upgrades rather than validator releases.
What happens to stake accounts below 1 SOL?
New delegations below the minimum are rejected, and a split or a move must leave both sides at or above it. Delegations that were already below 1 SOL are untouched: they keep earning, and you can still merge, deactivate or withdraw them.
Can I free stake stuck on a validator that stopped voting?
Yes. The deactivate-delinquent instruction can be sent by anyone against stake delegated to a long-delinquent validator; the stake then cools down and can be withdrawn.
What to Do This Month
- List every stake account your wallet controls, with its delegated amount. Anything under 1 SOL is now fixed in shape: it earns, but it cannot be split or moved.
- For each one: merge it into a larger account on the same validator, or deactivate and withdraw it. Both remain available; the rule does not touch existing delegations.
- While you are in there, take the rent surplus those accounts are holding. A stake account funded before the 11 September 2026 cut to 5,080 lamports per byte is over-funded whether you merge it or not.
— One Feature Account Sets the Floor —
The minimum changed at an epoch boundary, not on an announcement.
The v5 stake-program gate activated once 95% of stake ran software that supported it, which happened at epoch 989 on 18 June 2026. The upgrades tracker reads the feature-gate accounts from the chain every minute and shows the state on each cluster.
Constants read from the Agave validator source at commit beee69b958: runtime/src/stake_utils.rs, program-binaries/src/lib.rs and feature-set/src/lib.rs. The treatment of existing sub-minimum delegations was verified on 17 September 2026 against the SIMD-0490 text and the v5 program source (solana-program/stake: process_delegate, process_split, process_move_stake). The v5 gate activated on mainnet at slot 427,248,000 (epoch 989, 18 June 2026) and v5.1 at slot 443,232,000 (epoch 1026, 31 August 2026).
