Tier 1 Organizations

Tier 1 organizations are a group of organizations that bear the safety and liveness of the Stellar network on their shoulders. They earn this role because most other organizations on the network require agreement from them — by including them in their quorum sets — in order to commit to a new ledger.¹ To become a Tier 1 organization, a team running validators must convince enough other organizations to trust them. SDF works closely with Tier 1 organizations to ensure network health, maintain robust quorum intersection, and build in redundancy to minimize disruptions. This guide outlines the requirements, costs, and process for organizations that want to join (or evaluate joining) the Tier 1 quorum.

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What Tier 1 Requires

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Why Three Validators

On Stellar, validators choose to trust organizations when they configure their quorum set. If you are a trustworthy organization, you want your presence on the network to persist even if a node fails or you take it down for maintenance. A trio of validating nodes allows that to happen: other participants can require ⅔ of your nodes to agree. If one has issues, the other two still vote on your organization’s behalf. To ensure redundancy, those three Full Validators must be geographically dispersed — different data centers, ideally different cloud regions or providers. If all three are in the same facility, a single outage takes out your entire organization’s voting power.

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Estimated Costs

Running three Full Validators is more affordable than many newcomers expect, but the spread between cost-conscious and managed-cloud setups is wide. The dominant cost driver is bandwidth associated with serving your history archive — and that varies significantly by provider, by archive consumption patterns, and by whether you use a CDN or an egress-free object store. The table below groups setups into three archetypes that reflect actual choices made by current Tier 1 operators. Per-node figures assume a single Full Validator publishing its own history archive; three-node figures assume a Tier 1 deployment with geographic dispersion. Last reviewed: May 2026. Sanity-check against current provider pricing before budgeting. Costs reported by current Tier 1 operators range from roughly $160 to $1,800 per month for three nodes.

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What Drives the Variance

History archive bandwidth is the largest swing factor. Validators that are heavily consumed as a catch-up source — by other validators, archivers, RPC nodes, and ecosystem services — can serve 10–30 TB per month from a single archive. Whether that costs $0 or $2,700 depends almost entirely on your provider:

• Egress-free object storage (Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2 with Cloudflare in front) charges nothing for outbound bandwidth. Several Tier 1 operators use this approach specifically to remove archive bandwidth from the cost equation.
• Bundled bandwidth allowances (Hetzner includes 20 TB/month in EU regions; OVH includes generous traffic on dedicated servers) cover most realistic archive workloads at no marginal cost.
• Hyperscaler egress ($0.09/GB on AWS, similar on GCP and Azure) turns a 10 TB archive month into a $900 line item, before any compute or storage.

Archive consumption is uneven across your three nodes. Operators commonly report large variance between sibling nodes — one archive may serve tens of TB per month while another in the same fleet serves under 100 GB, depending on how each is configured in other operators’ archive lists. Plan capacity for at least one of your three nodes to be heavily consumed. Compute is a smaller line item than newcomers often assume. A node meeting the recommended hardware spec (8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, NVMe SSD) costs $40–80/month on dedicated providers like Contabo, Hetzner, or OVH, and $150–300/month on hyperscalers. Reserved or committed-use pricing on hyperscalers narrows this gap considerably.

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What Tier 1 Operators Actually Do

Among current Tier 1 organizations, the dominant pattern is dedicated or bare-metal providers with generous egress allowances, paired with egress-free or low-cost object storage for history archives. Hetzner, OVH, Contabo, and DigitalOcean appear repeatedly across the cohort; AWS, GCP, and Azure are notably underrepresented. This is not a recommendation to avoid hyperscalers — some operators use them deliberately for compliance, geographic, or operational reasons — but it is a pattern worth understanding before committing to a stack. If you are evaluating providers, the #validator channel on the Stellar Developer Discord is the best place to ask current operators what they are actually paying.

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Other Line Items

The archetypes above bundle these into the totals, but they are worth listing for completeness:

• DNS / domain registration: $1–5/month total. Negligible.
• Monitoring: $0–50/month total. Self-hosted Prometheus + Grafana on one of your existing nodes is functionally free; managed services like Grafana Cloud or Datadog push to the high end.

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What SDF and Existing Tier 1 Organizations Evaluate

Becoming Tier 1 is not a unilateral decision by SDF — it depends on the quorum set choices of all existing Tier 1 organizations. But SDF does steward the process. When evaluating candidates, the community considers:

1. Organizational mission alignment — Does your organization have a genuine stake in Stellar’s success? Do you issue assets, process payments, or build infrastructure on the network?
2. Identity and real-world presence — Are you transparent about who you are? Public leadership, registered entity, visible operations?
3. Operational excellence — Can you demonstrate sustained high uptime (99.9%+)? Is your monitoring professional-grade?
4. Geographic diversity — Are your nodes in different regions than existing Tier 1 organizations?
5. Jurisdictional diversity — Are you in a different legal jurisdiction, reducing correlated regulatory risk?
6. Infrastructure diversity — Do you use different cloud providers, ISPs, or hardware than existing organizations?
7. Economic diversity — Does your business model differ from existing Tier 1 organizations?
8. Responsiveness — Do you respond quickly to incidents, upgrade requests, and coordination needs?

No single dimension is disqualifying on its own, but organizations that strengthen the network across multiple dimensions are the strongest candidates.

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Step-by-Step Path to Tier 1

The checklist below covers the operational work. Completing it is necessary but not sufficient — see What SDF and Existing Tier 1 Organizations Evaluate above for the qualitative dimensions that determine whether existing Tier 1 organizations add you to their quorum sets.

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Phase 1: First Full Validator

Work through the Admin Guide to stand up a single Full Validator on Mainnet:

• Review prerequisites and provision a server
• Enable NTP clock synchronization
• Install Stellar Core from the SDF-published Ubuntu packages
• Configure for Mainnet with a validator key pair (stellar-core gen-seed)
• Prepare your environment and initialize the database
• Set up a history archive
• Start your node and sync to the network
• Set up monitoring with Prometheus + Grafana

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Phase 2: Three Full Validators

Scale to the Tier 1 architecture:

• Provision 2 additional servers in different geographic regions
• Generate unique key pairs for each node — never share seeds
• Configure each with its own history archive (one archive per node)
• Deploy the standard Tier 1 quorum set on all three nodes, declaring your own organization as HIGH quality
• Extend monitoring to cover all three nodes

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Phase 3: Identity and Verification

Make your organization discoverable and verifiable:

• Configure public DNS for each node (e.g., core-a.example.com, core-b.example.com, core-c.example.com)
• Create funded Stellar accounts for each validator node
• Set home domain on-chain for each (SEP-20)
• Publish a complete stellar.toml (SEP-1) with organization info and all three [[VALIDATORS]] entries
• Verify your nodes appear correctly on Obsrvr Radar

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Phase 4: Build Trust (Ongoing)

Earn the confidence of existing Tier 1 organizations:

• Join the Stellar Dev Discord #validator channel
• Maintain 99.9%+ uptime for 3+ months, visible on Obsrvr Radar
• Participate in upgrade coordination and governance discussions
• Respond promptly to maintenance coordination from other validators
• Engage with SDF about Tier 1 candidacy when your track record is established

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What Happens When You’re Ready

Once SDF and existing Tier 1 organizations agree you meet the bar:

1. Existing Tier 1 organizations update their quorum sets to include your validators
2. The standard Tier 1 quorum set configuration is updated to include your organization
3. You begin appearing as Tier 1 on network monitoring tools
4. You assume all the responsibilities described on this page

This is not a unilateral decision by SDF. Every existing Tier 1 organization independently decides whether to trust you by adding you to their quorum set.

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Working with the Tier 1 Community

Coordinate with other validators when you make significant changes. Specifically, let them know when you plan to:

• Take a node down for maintenance — so a critical mass of nodes don’t go offline simultaneously
• Make changes to your quorum set — so they can respond, adjust, and ensure quorum intersection is maintained
• Upgrade to a new Stellar Core version — especially when the release involves protocol upgrades or Soroban settings votes

For the Stellar network to expand safely, validators must coordinate off-chain to maintain good quorum intersection. Never change your quorum set without discussing it with other Tier 1 organizations first. The #validator channel on the Stellar Dev Discord is the primary place to do this coordination — and also where prospective Tier 1 candidates can introduce themselves and get guidance from existing operators and SDF. As Stellar grows and more businesses build on the network, Tier 1 organizations will be crucial to healthy expansion of the network.

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Resources

Footnotes

1. The notion of Tier 1 organization can be defined precisely, but this is besides the point of this page. ↩