Stake Account

Delegates SOL to a validator's Vote account. Tracks staker/withdrawer authorities, lockup, delegated amount, and activation epochs.

Stake Program 200 bytes

Sample: Stake Account

(cached; refreshes hourly · mainnet only)

Sample temporarily unavailable

We couldn’t fetch the cached sample from mainnet right now. The full hex view will try again live.

Try the visualizer

What it is

A Stake account delegates SOL to a validator’s Vote account to earn staking rewards. The 200-byte layout tracks who can manage the stake, how much is delegated, and when activation or deactivation lands.

Why it exists

Solana’s proof-of-stake consensus runs on these delegations. SOL holders create Stake accounts pointing at a validator’s Vote account; the Stake program manages epoch-based activation, computes per-epoch rewards, and records the credits the validator has earned. Liquid staking protocols like Marinade and Jito hold large pools of Stake accounts on behalf of their depositors.

Byte layout

The layout is a 4-byte state enum followed by a Meta struct and (when state = Stake) a Delegation struct.

Offset	Length	Field	Type	Notes
0	4	`state`	`u32` enum	`0` Uninitialized, `1` Initialized, `2` Stake, `3` RewardsPool.
4	8	`rent_exempt_reserve`	`u64` LE	SOL reserved for rent exemption.
12	32	`authorized_staker`	`Pubkey`	May delegate, deactivate, split, merge.
44	32	`authorized_withdrawer`	`Pubkey`	May withdraw funds. Typically held in cold storage.
76	8	`lockup.unix_timestamp`	`i64` LE	Lockup expires at this UNIX time.
84	8	`lockup.epoch`	`u64` LE	Lockup expires at this epoch.
92	32	`lockup.custodian`	`Pubkey`	May bypass the lockup.
124	32	`voter_pubkey`	`Pubkey`	Vote account this stake delegates to.
156	8	`stake_amount`	`u64` LE	Delegated SOL in lamports.
164	8	`activation_epoch`	`u64` LE	Epoch when delegation activates.
172	8	`deactivation_epoch`	`u64` LE	`u64::MAX` if still active.
180	8	`credits_observed`	`u64` LE	Validator credits at last reward calc.

Total: 200 bytes (offsets 188-199 are warmup/cooldown padding in older layouts, zero in current).

Where you see it

Validator dashboards, liquid staking flows, and any RPC call that walks delegations (getStakeActivation, getProgramAccounts on the Stake program).

Common gotchas

Two-step authorities. authorized_staker and authorized_withdrawer can be different keys — cold storage holds the withdrawer while a hot key manages delegations.
deactivation_epoch = u64::MAX means “still active.” A finite value means deactivation has been requested; the stake cools down over one epoch before funds become withdrawable.
Stake doesn’t immediately earn rewards. Activation takes one full epoch. Rewards land at the start of each subsequent epoch.

Sources

Stake program state (agave sdk/program/src/stake/state.rs)