Vote Account

A validator's on-chain identity. Records voting authority, commission rate, and a rolling history of votes and epoch credits.

Vote Program 3,762 bytes

Sample: Vote Account

(cached; refreshes hourly · mainnet only)

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What it is

A Vote account is a validator’s on-chain identity. It records the validator’s voting authority, its commission rate, and a 3.7 KB rolling history of recent votes and epoch credits.

Why it exists

Every validator on Solana has exactly one Vote account. Stake accounts point at a Vote account to delegate; the Vote program records the validator’s votes (which slots it confirmed and when), and the network uses that record to distribute staking rewards proportional to the validator’s participation.

Byte layout

The first 109 bytes are field-level decodable. The remaining ~3,653 bytes are a packed buffer of recent LandedVote entries.

Offset	Length	Field	Type	Notes
0	4	`version`	`u32` enum	Vote state version (`0` v0, `1` v1_14_11, `2` current).
4	32	`node_pubkey`	`Pubkey`	The validator’s identity keypair.
36	32	`authorized_withdrawer`	`Pubkey`	Claims rewards. Typically cold storage.
68	1	`commission`	`u8`	Validator commission percentage (0–100).
69	40	`authorized_voters`	epoch map	Active authorized voter pubkey by epoch.
109	3653	`vote_history`	`LandedVote[]`	Packed buffer; each LandedVote ≈ 12 bytes (slot, confirmation count, latency).

Total: 3,762 bytes.

Where you see it

Staking flows (looking up a validator’s commission before delegating), validator dashboards, leader-schedule logic. RPC calls like getVoteAccounts return one entry per Vote account.

Common gotchas

The on-chain layout is too dense to byte-annotate inline. For the exact LandedVote struct, see the Agave source linked above or walk the buffer with getProgramAccounts on the Vote program.
authorized_voter rotates per epoch. The on-chain layout stores a small map of (epoch → pubkey) entries, not a single pubkey.
Commission changes don’t apply instantly. Vote programs enforce timing limits to prevent rugging delegators mid-epoch.

Sources

Vote program state (agave sdk/program/src/vote/state/mod.rs)