How the GDI is computed

What we're measuring

A simple question: does this pool delegate to places that need stake, or does it pile more onto already-popular validators?

A pool whose stake sits in the same handful of overweight cities and ASNs as everyone else isn't improving network decentralisation, regardless of how internally diverse its own delegations look. A pool that finds underweight regions — Hong Kong, São Paulo, Manila, Lagos — is doing the actual work of decentralising the network.

The formula

For each validator v in a pool with stake fraction wᵥ, we compute its rarity on three dimensions — country, city, and autonomous system number (ASN):

rarity_D(v)  =  -ln( network_share_D(category of v) )       D ∈ {country, city, ASN}

network_share_D(category) is the fraction of total network stake currently delegated to validators in that category. A validator in NYC (where ~8% of network stake sits) has a low rarity; a validator in Manila (~0.1%) has a high rarity.

The pool's Decentralisation Contribution on each dimension is the stake-weighted average rarity of its validators:

DC_D  =  Σᵥ wᵥ · rarity_D(v)

The composite GDI is the geometric mean of the three:

GDI  =  ( DC_country · DC_city · DC_asn )^(1/3)

Geometric mean penalises being good on one dimension and poor on another — these are distinct decentralisation risk classes. A pool that's geographically diverse but everyone's on AWS still has a single-ASN failure mode.

The GDI deliberately excludes operator-quality composites (Stakewiz wiz_score, similar). Those metrics weight things like commission, which validators operating in remote regions often set higher to cover real cost differences — exactly the geographic decentralisation the index is designed to reward. Mixing quality and decentralisation into one number creates counter-incentives. Quality signals belong on their source (Stakewiz, Solana Compass); GDI's job is geographic spread.

Why three dimensions?

The obvious objection: country and city are correlated. If you know a validator is in Frankfurt, you know it's in Germany. So isn't the country dimension redundant once city is in the formula?

Correlated, yes. Redundant, no. Consider a pool with five validators in LA, San Francisco, NYC, Chicago, and Dallas — five different US cities on five different ASNs. On a city-and-ASN-only composite that pool looks well-decentralised. With the country dimension included, the same pool scores poorly on country (effectively one bucket: US), and the geometric mean drags the composite down. That's the right answer: single-jurisdiction concentration is a real risk class, distinct from physical-location and network-operator risk.

The three failure modes are independent:

• Country — regulatory action, sanctions, jurisdiction-specific rule changes (e.g. China's 2021 crypto crackdown took ~50% of Bitcoin hashrate offline overnight).
• City — power outage, datacenter incident, regional fiber cut, weather event.
• ASN — cloud-provider outage, BGP misconfiguration, network-operator-level disruption.

Geometric mean weights the three equally — no domain-expert opinion baked in about which risk class is most important. A pool concentrated on any single dimension gets pulled down by the geometric mean regardless of how diverse it looks on the other two. This is the intended behaviour: you don't want a pool with all stake on AWS (single-ASN failure mode) to claim a high score because its cities and countries are diverse.

The active validator set (what counts as "the network")

Network shares are stake-weighted over Solana's actively-voting validator set:

active = { v in Stakewiz : !v.delinquent AND v.activated_stake > 0 }

Roughly 760 of ~1,955 Stakewiz records at any given time. Delinquent or zero-stake validators still appear on chain (their stake is delegated, just not producing votes), but counting them in the denominator would inflate the network size and artificially lower rarity values for popular buckets. The active-set definition matches Solana's getVoteAccounts.current convention used by Stakewiz, Solana Beach, and other ecosystem tooling.

The same definition gates the active-set rank shown on each validator's lookup page at /validator.

Network baseline (reference value)

Applying the same formula to the active validator set gives the network baseline GDI — by construction, the network's own stake-weighted average rarity. It's published at /gdi/network-baseline.json each epoch as a reference value. The leaderboard ranks pools by GDI directly (higher = more decentralised) rather than by deviation from the baseline; we found the rank-based framing easier to read than "+X% vs baseline". The baseline is still useful as a single number for "how decentralised is Solana right now overall?".

Data sources

Concentration: computed vs reported

Stakewiz publishes its own per-validator city_concentration and asn_concentration fields. The GDI does not use these directly for scoring — instead, we compute network shares ourselves from the raw activated_stake + IP fields, so the math is fully reproducible from public inputs and we cover all three dimensions (country, city, ASN) the same way (Stakewiz doesn't expose a country-concentration field).

We do store Stakewiz's reported concentration values alongside our own computed shares as a sanity check. A side-by-side comparison for the top buckets is published at /gdi/concentration-crosscheck.json each ingest. Wide divergence between our numbers and Stakewiz's would be a red flag — if you spot one, file an issue.

Limitations (read these before quoting a score)

• IP-derived geography is imperfect. Cloud-provider IPs occasionally place a chunk of stake in tiny countries (e.g. Andorra) that have no real node presence. This shifts absolute rarity numbers by a few percent but doesn't change pool rankings between pools using the same data.
• Stake within an epoch is fixed. Solana stake delegations only activate at epoch boundaries, so per-epoch resolution is the natural cadence. Don't expect intra-epoch updates.
• Per-epoch numbers are noisy. Pool rebalancing causes legitimate single-epoch swings of several percent. The score we publish is the current epoch's value; multi-epoch rolling averages aren't computed yet (planned). Read trends across a few consecutive epochs of raw JSON for now.
• A pool with one validator in a rare place can score very high. The leaderboard surfaces validator-count alongside the score so small pools are visually distinct. We track the top-20 SPL stake pools by TVL; single-validator pools are excluded from the ranked leaderboard and surface separately as "tracked but unscored".
• Placement coverage. Each pool's row reports the fraction of its stake we could place geographically (typically 100%; lower if a validator's metadata is unavailable from both Stakewiz and Validators.app). Stake we can't place is excluded from the rarity calculation so it neither helps nor hurts the pool's score.

Version policy

Current methodology version: gdi-1.1.1. Historical scores remain reproducible under their original version forever — each pool_scores row carries the version it was computed under, and a methodology bump only affects new epochs.

Disclosure

The maintainer of this index — Tielman (@tielmane on X, @realtielman on Telegram) — also operates the Definity stake pool, which appears in this leaderboard. Scoring is mechanical and reproducible from public data — there is no manual adjustment. Any pool's GDI can be recomputed from this page's formula plus the raw inputs published at /gdi/*.json. The maintainer cannot privilege any one pool without that privilege being visible in the code and the published JSON. The eventual aim is handoff to a fully neutral steward (Stakewiz, Solana Compass, or the Solana Foundation) once the project has a track record.