Rank	Validator	Stake	Share	Cumulative	Comm.
01	Backpack	2.12B MON	13.72%	13.72%	3%
02	CMS Holdings	369.6M MON	2.40%	16.12%	4%
03	Kraken	291.6M MON	1.89%	18.01%	15%
04	LeMonad	250.7M MON	1.63%	19.64%	3%
05	gmonads.com	236.0M MON	1.53%	21.17%	15%
06	P2P.org 💙	230.8M MON	1.50%	22.67%	15%
07	polkachu.com	201.2M MON	1.30%	23.97%	0%
08	Alchemy	160.9M MON	1.04%	25.01%	10%
09	Nansen \| Stake to Stack Points	147.0M MON	0.95%	25.96%	15%
10	ProStaking	135.7M MON	0.88%	26.84%	15%
11	Stardust Staking	128.7M MON	0.83%	27.67%	15%
12	MonadVision	116.6M MON	0.76%	28.43%	15%
13	Bitwise Onchain Solutions	116.6M MON	0.76%	29.19%	15%
14	Everstake	111.0M MON	0.72%	29.91%	15%
15	B-Harvest	110.6M MON	0.72%	30.63%	15%
16	Gemini	106.5M MON	0.69%	31.32%	15%
17	MAVAN	102.6M MON	0.67%	31.99%	10%
18	forthenads	101.2M MON	0.66%	32.65%	15%
19	Staking4All	97.7M MON	0.63%	33.28%	10%
20	Stakin by The Tie← LIVENESS THRESHOLD	97.0M MON	0.63%	33.91%	10%
21	BitCtrl	96.7M MON	0.63%	34.54%	15%
22	01node	96.4M MON	0.63%	35.17%	15%
23	P-OPS Team	91.9M MON	0.60%	35.77%	15%
24	Kairos Research X Firstset	90.9M MON	0.59%	36.36%	15%
25	Kiln1	90.1M MON	0.58%	36.94%	15%
26	Etherfuse	90.1M MON	0.58%	37.52%	15%
27	GalaxyDigital	90.0M MON	0.58%	38.10%	5%
28	Allnodes	88.2M MON	0.57%	38.67%	10%
29	Triton one	85.9M MON	0.56%	39.23%	10%
30	Blockdaemon	84.7M MON	0.55%	39.78%	10%
31	Luganodes	84.4M MON	0.55%	40.33%	15%
32	Validation Cloud	83.3M MON	0.54%	40.87%	15%
33	nadradar	83.0M MON	0.54%	41.41%	15%
34	Figment	82.0M MON	0.53%	41.94%	15%
35	rskl	80.8M MON	0.52%	42.46%	15%
36	L0vd	80.4M MON	0.52%	42.98%	15%
37	auri0x	79.8M MON	0.52%	43.50%	15%
38	Laminated Labs	79.3M MON	0.51%	44.01%	15%
39	Spectrum Staking	78.3M MON	0.51%	44.52%	15%
40	H2O Nodes	78.0M MON	0.51%	45.03%	15%
41	Staking Facilities	78.0M MON	0.51%	45.54%	15%
42	InfStones	77.9M MON	0.51%	46.05%	15%
43	stakefish	77.5M MON	0.50%	46.55%	15%
44	ContributionDAO	77.2M MON	0.50%	47.05%	15%
45	TrustedPoint	76.4M MON	0.50%	47.55%	15%
46	LI.FI	75.7M MON	0.49%	48.04%	15%
47	LootGO	75.6M MON	0.49%	48.53%	15%
48	Cointelegraph Decentralization Guardians	75.3M MON	0.49%	49.02%	15%
49	ASXN	75.2M MON	0.49%	49.51%	15%
50	1XP	75.2M MON	0.49%	50.00%	15%

First edition · Published 2026-06-01

State of Decentralization - May 2026

This is the first monthly report from monscope, written to take a clear-eyed look at how the Monad validator set is actually distributed: where stake sits, where validators sit, whose machines they sit on, and how dependent the network is on Foundation delegations. Numbers throughout cite the on-chain staking precompile snapshot captured on 2026-05-23 at epoch 1529, with 200 active validators and 15.27B MONtotal active stake. Foundation-delegation figures cite monscope's identified Foundation wallet-fleet snapshot generated on 2026-06-01.

Headline

By classical concentration measures the network is unconcentrated. The Herfindahl–Hirschman Index sits at 197- well below the U.S. DOJ's 1,500 antitrust threshold - and the stake Gini is 0.322. The top ten validators control 24.52% of active stake, and it takes 23 validators acting in concert to cross the BFT liveness threshold (> 1/3), or 94 to cross the safety threshold (> 2/3). The bottom two-thirds of the active set still hold meaningful weight: the top 67 - the first third of validators by stake - control 56.20% of stake combined.

The story changes once you zoom out from individual validators to the physical and political infrastructure they run on. There the picture is much narrower:

Country Nakamoto = 2. Just two countries - the United States (22.64%) and the Netherlands (17.01%) - combined hold more than a third of all stake.
Provider Nakamoto = 2. One hosting provider, TeraSwitch Networks, runs 19.33% of stake. A second pushes the running total past one-third.
Foundation delegation = 74.03% of active stake. Monscope's identified Foundation fleet delegates 11.25B MON through 20 staking wallets to 197 active validators.

Healthy validator-level decentralization plus thin geographic/infra diversity and heavy Foundation delegation is the central tension of Monad mainnet in May 2026. It is the kind of structural risk that does not show up in a Nakamoto-by-validator chart.

Stake distribution

The active set is full at 200/200 with one additional validator eligible but unranked into consensus. The smallest active validator holds 25.1M MON - comfortably above the 10M MON protocol floor - while the largest holds 1.84B MON, a 73× spread. Mean active stake is 76.4M MON, median 53.3M MON; the long tail above the median is what gives the stake distribution its skew without pushing the headline concentration measures into the worrying range.

Cumulative top-N stake shares:

Top 1 - 12.05% (Backpack at 1.84B MON)
Top 3 - 15.95%
Top 5 - 18.91%
Top 10 - 24.52%
Top 33 - 39.22%
Top 67 - 56.20% - the top third of validators control just over half of stake

Commission: the cap is the market

The most striking validator-level finding is how completely the VDP commission cap has become the prevailing rate. 170 of 200 active validators (85.0%) sit exactly at the 15% cap that took effect on April 24, 2026. Four run at exactly 0%, presumably as a delegator incentive; twenty-four sit somewhere between 0% and 15%; two are above the cap and therefore ineligible for Foundation delegation. Mean commission is 14.43%; median is 15.00%.

A binding cap is supposed to function as a ceiling, not a coordination point - and yet the empirical commission curve is almost flat at the ceiling. This is the rational outcome under a Foundation that delegates only to validators below the cap, but it does mean delegators have little price competition to choose between. The four validators at 0% are the meaningful outliers from a delegator's perspective.

Geographic distribution

Validators run in 29 countries - superficially broad, but stake distribution is much narrower. The top three countries - United States, the Netherlands, and Germany - combine for 54.9% of stake. The country Nakamoto of 2 means the failure of any infrastructure environment across U.S. + Netherlands (a regional outage, a coordinated regulatory action) would directly threaten BFT liveness.

Top countries by stake-weighted share:

🇺🇸 United States - 22.64%
🇳🇱 The Netherlands - 17.01%
🇩🇪 Germany - 15.31%
🇸🇬 Singapore - 5.09%
🇫🇮 Finland - 4.54%
🇫🇷 France - 4.49%

The country Gini is 0.641 - twice the validator-level Gini of 0.322. Stake is much more evenly distributed across validator operators than across the jurisdictions those operators choose to host in.

Infrastructure concentration

The 200 active validators span 52 distinct autonomous systems - better diversity than the country picture suggests, but with one outlier: TeraSwitch Networks (AS20326) hosts validators controlling 19.33% of stake. The next largest are OVH SAS, Hetzner Online GmbH, and UAB Cherry Servers - all bare-metal-and-colocation providers, consistent with the protocol's expectation that validators run on dedicated hardware rather than hyperscaler clouds.

Provider Nakamoto is also 2: TeraSwitch alone plus one additional provider clear the 1/3 threshold. The bare-metal mandate works as designed (we see no Amazon, Google, or Microsoft ASNs in the top providers), but it has produced gravitational concentration around the small number of colos that meet the hardware spec at competitive pricing.

Foundation stake

The Monad Foundation publicly committed 9.3B MON across roughly 170 validators in Wave 1 of the VDP, rebalanced twice (January and April 2026). Monscope identifies a Foundation delegation fleet of 20 staking EOAs, each funded by the same distributor and delegating in clean VDP tier amounts. Combined, those wallets delegate 11.25B MON, or 74.03% of the active set, to 197 of 200 active validators.

This makes Foundation delegation the dominant dependency in the active set. 188 validators receive more than half of their stake from the identified fleet, and 171 would fall below the 10M MON active-validator floor if Foundation stake withdrew. The validator-level Nakamoto chart still looks healthy because this stake is spread across many operators; the funding source tells a different story.

The delegation map on this page is the clearest way to inspect that structure: one distributor funds the 20 staking wallets, and those wallets fan out across almost the entire active set. Validators colored red on the map are majority-dependent on Foundation stake; amber validators receive a meaningful minority share; green validators are less exposed. This is forensic attribution by monscope, not an official Foundation disclosure.

Context: the upgrade backdrop

May 2026 is the first full month after the MONAD_NINE mainnet upgrade (activated 2026-03-19), which shipped MIP-3 (Linear Memory), MIP-4 (Reserve Balance Introspection), and the Fusaka EIP activations of MIP-5. None of these changed the validator economics or the consensus protocol; the validator set composition above reflects six weeks of post-upgrade stability.

Three MIPs in draft would meaningfully reshape the decentralization picture if adopted:

MIP-9 (Active Set Increase) - would expand ACTIVE_VALSET_SIZE from 200 to 300, creating room for 99 additional validators (only 1 is eligible-and-waiting today, so the constraint is the 10M MON stake floor, not the cap).
MIP-10 (Deterministic RaptorCast) - closes two propagation-layer attacks and lets validators vote on the Merkle root before decoding. Reduces the consensus critical path by one message delay.
MIP-11 (Automatic Priority Fee Distribution) - would redirect priority fees to delegators automatically, rather than to the validator's beneficiary address. May shift the apparent commission economics significantly once live.

What we'll watch in June

Whether validator-set membership shifts at the epoch boundaries - current churn rate is effectively zero, but a handful of validators sit near the lowest active-stake band.
Movement at the 0% commission tier: today 4 validators attract delegators without a cut. If that number grows, the 15%-cap monoculture starts to look like a soft monopoly.
MIP draft activity. We expect at least one of MIP-9 / 10 / 11 to move from Draft to Review.
Foundation delegation rebalance signals. The VDP changelog notes that the Foundation expects its stake share to fall over time. The identified fleet currently accounts for roughly three-quarters of active stake, so even small rebalances can materially change validator dependence.

Methodology

Stake, commission, and active-set composition come from the 0x…1000 staking precompile (getConsensusValidatorSet, getValidator) on the public Monad RPC, captured at 2026-05-23. Validator names resolve through monad-developers/validator-info. Geographic and ASN attribution is derived from resolved peer-IP metadata in the decentralization snapshot; monscope's analysis (country/provider Nakamoto, Gini, and the concentration narrative) is its own. Foundation-stake figures come from a forensically identified fleet of 20 staking EOAs funded by a common distributor and delegating in VDP tier amounts. That attribution is identified, not an official Monad Foundation address label.