Validator Glossary
Plain definitions for terms you encounter in logs, RPC responses, and cluster documentation.
Terms are grouped by how operators encounter them during daily runs. Join a Glossary Study Hour to walk through any entry with live examples.
- Epoch
- A schedule boundary in Solana consensus. Stake delegations activate at epoch edges, and leader schedules are computed per epoch. When operators say "wait until next epoch," they mean the pending stake or config change lands at that boundary.
- Vote account
- A separate on-chain account from your validator identity keypair. It records tower votes and accumulates credits. Delegators stake to the vote account pubkey, not the identity that signs blocks.
- Tower
- The stack of voted slots maintained by a validator. Tower depth affects fork choice — deeper towers make it costly to vote on alternate forks. Stalled tower advancement often appears in logs before skip rate rises.
- Root bank
- The latest slot considered finalized by supermajority vote lockout. Banking stage work builds on banks descended from the root. If your node falls far behind the cluster root, replay lag shows up in performance metrics.
- Skip rate
- Percentage of assigned leader slots where the validator failed to produce a block. High skip rate reduces vote credits and delegator confidence. Distinguish local causes (disk, CPU) from cluster-wide leader schedule gaps.
- Turbine
- Solana's block propagation protocol that shards data across the peer graph. Turbine misconfiguration or peer clustering can delay shred arrival even when your CPU is idle.
- Gossip
- The peer discovery and metadata exchange layer. Your gossip peer list should span multiple autonomous systems. A list collapsed to one hosting provider is a common health-review finding.
- Snapshot
- A compressed ledger state used to bootstrap or catch up a validator quickly. Incremental snapshots reduce download size but depend on correct directory permissions and available disk headroom.
- Banking stage
- The pipeline stage that executes transactions and prepares entries for the leader to shred. Banking-stage latency spikes often correlate with account lock contention during high-TPS periods.
- Commission
- The percentage of staking rewards retained by the vote account operator. Delegators compare commission alongside skip rate and uptime history when choosing validators.