Get StartedMigrate to Managed — Without Missing a Vote
Running your own Solana validator and ready to stop? AllenHark moves you onto managed hardware without losing your on-chain identity, your delegators, or a single vote credit.
Why migrate
Self-hosting a Solana validator is a serious operational commitment. Bare-metal hardware in a Tier-1 facility, 24/7 on-call, client upgrades that have to land on every Solana release, a Jito MEV integration to wire up, slashing risk to manage, and a hot-standby node to keep warm. For an operator whose core business is not validator engineering, that is a tax — not a strategic capability.
The migration to managed is the move from running a validator to owning a validator. The on-chain identity, the delegators, the brand, the commission flow — all stay with you. Hardware, on-call, upgrades, MEV plumbing, monitoring, and SLA — all move to AllenHark. Same validator, fewer pagers.
The five-step playbook
Every migration runs through this checklist. Most operators are live on managed inside ten business days end-to-end.
- 1
Pre-flight checklist
Audit the current validator: identity and vote keys, stake accounts, MEV client configuration, monitoring stack, SLA exposure, and on-call rotation. Identify the cutover window and the rollback plan.
- 2
Vote-key handover
Securely transfer the vote identity to the new managed hardware. Slashing protection bookkeeping persists across the boundary; the new node refuses to vote until the old node has been confirmed retired.
- 3
Snapshot + warm catchup
Pull a recent snapshot, run the new node to head, and validate it against the canonical ledger. The new node tracks the network silently — no votes cast, no slot risk — until the cutover.
- 4
Hot-standby cutover
Promote the new node from standby to primary. Slashing-protection-aware promotion path means the old node is retired before the new one starts voting. Cutover typically completes inside one slot.
- 5
Post-migration validation
Vote credits, leader-slot production, MEV-tip routing, dashboard reporting, SLA monitoring — every signal verified before sign-off. Retired node decommissioned only after the new node has produced for a full epoch.
What you keep, what we take
You keep
- Vote and identity keys
- On-chain history and vote credits
- Brand, dashboard, validator name
- Commission rate and structure
- Delegator relationships
- The right to walk to another provider
We take
- Hardware and data-center contract
- Agave / Firedancer client upgrades
- Jito MEV plumbing and tuning
- 24/7 monitoring and on-call
- Hot-standby failover
- SLA reporting and incident response
Ready to migrate?
Send us the validator pubkey and a contact. We will return a pre-flight checklist, a proposed cutover window, and a flat-fee quote inside one business day.
FAQ
Can I really migrate without missing a vote?
Yes. The migration is engineered around hot-standby promotion. The new node runs silently to head before any signing happens; the cutover happens with slashing-protection bookkeeping handed off cleanly. We have done this many times — the operator typically does not lose a single vote credit during the window.
How long does the full migration take?
From initial pre-flight to cutover: typically 5–10 business days, the bulk of which is warm-catchup time and validation. The actual cutover window is small — a few minutes at most.
Do I keep my on-chain identity and my delegators?
Yes — that is the entire point. The vote identity is yours; we move it to managed hardware. Delegators do not need to take any action. Your validator's on-chain history, vote credits, and reputation persist.
What if something goes wrong during cutover?
The pre-flight phase produces a rollback plan. If anything in the post-cutover validation fails, the old node can be brought back online — slashing-protection records prevent the new node from voting until the old one is retired, so we are never in an ambiguous state.
Do I need to be involved hands-on?
Not deeply. The operator's input is concentrated in pre-flight (audit, sign-off on the cutover window) and post-migration validation (confirm dashboards look right). The middle is execution.
What about the MEV (Jito) configuration?
We migrate the Jito client configuration as part of pre-flight. If you were running vanilla Agave with no MEV, we can light up Jito MEV as part of the cutover — operator confirms before that goes live.
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