I am trying to identify the best way to earn rewards on Solana staking. Let's assume I have 100 SOL. What is best for APY:
Does reward allocation works in a way that your validator has to perform transactions validation in order to receive a reward, and this can happen only if your validator get randomly selected?
staking with a validator creates a staking account so every time you stake you need to pay around 0.0033 Sol, which is 0.3sol if you stake 100 times. So I would recommend pick 3 good validators and put a third in each to safe these fees.
You rewards depend not on the amount of staked sol, but on the speed an uptime of your validator of choice.
Here you can see the estimated rewards per year for different validators. Everything around 6% is perfect. https://solanacompass.com/validators/
Solution 1. isn't practical, solution 2. is risky. Use a liquid staking solution (marinade.finance, lido.fi/solana, ...).
You freeze your SOL in the protocol and get a staking derivative (mSol, stSol, ...), which you can use in defi or exchange and then bring back to the protocol for a higher proportion of SOL.
There is no impact on rewards between #1 or #2 if you delegate to the same validator. If you are choosing only a single validator, go with #1 to save the small transaction fees required to create & maintain the stake accounts.
#2, splitting a stake account into multiple smaller accounts, is a good idea if you want to select multiple validators. By selecting multiple validators, you reduce the risk of losing rewards if one of the validators has extended downtime. You also spread the stake around to improve cluster security.
Regarding the last part of your question, the staking rewards are based on validator uptime & voting performance. The leader schedule will not impact staking rewards.
