The Solana Staking Rate is the total staking yield that the Solana network can pay at the validator level before any validator commission or protocol fees.
In simple terms:
Solana Staking Rate = inflation rewards + MEV rewards + priority fee rewards, annualized as a percentage
You can think of it as the raw network staking rate.
If you ran your own validator with 0% commission and passed all rewards to yourself, this is roughly the yearly percentage you could earn in SOL, ignoring your hardware and running costs.
Where do these rewards come from?
When you stake SOL, rewards are made up of:
Inflation rewards
New SOL created by the protocol and paid to validators based on stake and performance.MEV rewards
Extra rewards validators can earn from how they order and include transactions in blocks.Priority fee rewards
Part of the transaction fees that users pay to speed up their transactions.
These priority fees are kept by the validator.
Delegators only benefit from them if a protocol or strategy is designed to redistribute that value. For example, Marinade Select and Marinade Max Yield effectively pass priority fees back to stakers through validator bids.
When we add these three components and annualize them from recent on chain data, we get the Solana Staking Rate.
Why does this matter?
It gives a clear benchmark for staking on Solana.
It shows what you could earn by self staking with a good validator setup and 0% commission, ignoring infrastructure costs.
When we say a strategy or product is close to or beating self staking, we compare its net APY to the Solana Staking Rate.
Because the Solana Staking Rate includes priority fees on top of inflation, it is often slightly higher than headline validator APY numbers that only count inflation and MEV based rewards.