[Solana Tightens Validator Funding Rules: Participation Period Limited to 12 Months, Automatic Exit After Staking Over 300,000 SOL] BlockBeats reported on November 10th that Jacob Creech, VP of Technology at the Solana Foundation, responded to the controversy surrounding recent adjustments to the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP). The adjustments include: setting the participation period for validators in SFDP to 12 months, automatic graduation after staking 300,000 SOL, setting the maximum number of validators to 100, and requiring participants to run their own validator nodes. Jacob Creech stated that SFDP initially had three main tasks: helping new validators get started, establishing a healthy testnet, and allowing some validators to test network updates in advance. As the Solana ecosystem has expanded and the validator community has matured, the original SFDP mechanism has become insufficient to meet the ever-changing needs of the network. Therefore, the Foundation hopes to shift to a more proactive and flexible delegation mechanism, focusing on supporting network health and ecosystem contributors. SFDP will continue to support new validators, and the Foundation will also reward validators who make significant contributions to the health of the network through delegation methods outside of SFDP. Previously, the Foundation has delegated staking to ecosystem contributors such as Blueshift and supported validators who were among the first to test Frankendancer. Regarding community concerns that the adjustments might lead to a decrease in the number of validators, Jacob Creech stated that reducing the number of validators is not the goal of this adjustment, but a decrease in the number of validators could be a side effect if a sufficient number of high-quality contributors cannot be found. He also revealed that more than 100 validators have submitted materials requesting continued support.