Alpenglow drops a vote account without a BLS key before it counts stake

At about 1,300 voting validators, Solana sits roughly 700 seats short of the 2,000-seat cap ^[1][2][1]. So the tests that bite first are the two that run before the sort. Both live in a filter function in the validator, which a dev.to post reads line by line ^[20].

Alpenglow votes are BLS signatures. A vote account with no BLS public key in its vote state cannot vote, and the filter drops it before it looks at stake ^[4]. The post calls this the check most likely to catch a validator that upgraded the binary and forgot the key ^[5]. Stake does not rescue it, and neither does the payout path: the node runs the same filter twice, once for consensus admission and once for reward distribution ^[16].

The balance test is the number easiest to get wrong. A vote state is 3,762 bytes, and at the mainnet rent rate in force after the second SIMD-0437 step, 5,080 lamports per byte, the rent-exempt minimum comes to 19,110,960 lamports, about 0.019 SOL ^[7][14][2]. Add one epoch's ticket at today's 400 ms slots and the bar is roughly 1.62 SOL ^[9][3]. Since 3 September 2026 the node subtracts accrued delegator rewards from the lamport balance before it compares, because those lamports are not the validator's to spend ^[7]. A vote account holding 3 SOL of which 1.5 SOL belongs to delegators presents 1.5 SOL to the test and misses by about 0.12 SOL ^[15][4].

Ticket pricing is a table keyed to slot time: 1.6 SOL per epoch at 400 ms, 1.4 at 350 ms, 1.2 at 300 ms, 1.0 at 250 ms, 0.8 at 200 ms ^[9]. The per-epoch figure falls because faster slots make shorter epochs, and the annual cost holds by construction, with 1.6 SOL over 182.6 epochs and 0.8 SOL over 365.2 epochs both landing near 292 SOL a validator ^[10]. Genesis pre-funds each bootstrap vote account with 160 SOL, which is 100 epochs of tickets ^[13].

Since 9 September 2026 the debit has had its own reward type in block reward data, so explorers and tax tools will show a negative line item on every admitted vote account once the gate is live ^[12]. The node will also state its verdict on request. The admin RPC method validatorAdmissionTicketStatus reports eligibility two epochs ahead, with three failure reasons: vote account not found, no BLS pubkey, and insufficient funds in the vote account ^[18].

The cut-off itself is one line of code, keeping only stakes greater than the floor, so a single lamport above a neighbour holds a seat and a single lamport below loses one ^[8]. For the seat cost, 1.62 SOL is the right bar only for an operator whose vote account holds nothing but its own lamports. Share block revenue through that account and the bar becomes 1.62 SOL plus whatever the delegators are owed ^[15].