Solana’s “retired” validators still vote with 15% of active stake

Thirty-one Solana validators marked “Retired” by the Solana Foundation’s delegation program were still voting in a Nov. 14 snapshot. They carried 63 million SOL in delegated stake, about 15% of active stake in the voting accounts CryptoSlate examined. The finding sharpens the question facing smaller validators under the Foundation’s published 12-month membership model: whether they can replace program support with other delegation. CryptoSlate compared the Foundation’s participant register with voting data from Solana’s mainnet RPC endpoint , captured at approximately 05:15 UTC on November 14, 2026. The accompanying epoch response placed the observation at epoch 1086.