Kiln scores 3 points above Luganodes, led by rate transparency, lock-up disclosure, and voting from custody. Kiln ranks #1 and Luganodes #2 of 7 published staking. Every term of the gap is on the ledger below; the inputs are on the audit receipt.
Kiln79
vs
Luganodes76
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99 · ranks #1 and #2 of 7
Kiln scores 3 points above Luganodes, led by rate transparency, lock-up disclosure, and voting from custody.
Kiln #1 of 779
Luganodes #2 of 776
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99; a bar is empty at 41 and full at 99.
Why, term by termKiln leads on 3 of 4 published criteria; Luganodes on 1. The terms sum to the gap.
TermKilnLuganodesWeightPoints
Slashing cover6/109/108.2−6.4for Luganodes−3.3 of 32
Rate transparency6/105/105.8+1.5for Kiln+0.8 of 32
Lock-up disclosure8/103/105.3+6.9for Kiln+3.5 of 32
Voting from custody7/106/104.8+1.2for Kiln+0.6 of 32
Net of the terms+3.2
Criteria roundingThe criteria block is rounded to whole points before it is spread−0.1
Reproduced gap+3.1
Published gapAfter score rounding and bounds — see the note below7976+3.0
Weight is in points of the 86-point weighted total. Points are score points of the gap between the two.
Kiln's lead rests on lighter criteria: Luganodes is ahead on slashing cover, which carries more weight (34) than any criterion Kiln leads on (24).
KilnScore 79The white-label validator operator running under other firms' staking buttons, with 15 named custody-platform integration guides and a per-network lock-up figure published across 26 protocol docs pages (2026-09-28 count) — but a slashing base layer whose size it has never quantified, a commission printed for only two of those 26 networks, and a governance posture stated for two niche products while the Cosmos-family chains where delegated stake actually votes are left silent.Strength: Unbonding disclosure — 8/10Watch-out: Read all three parts of the September 2025 breach disclosure before you sign, and then ask for the base slashing coverage limit in writing. Kiln itself names the victim. (1) https://www.kiln.fi/post/sol-incident-swissborg---announcement, September 8, 2025: "SwissBorg and Kiln are investigating an incident that may have involved unauthorized access to a wallet used for staking operations... The incident resulted in Solana funds being improperly removed from the wallet used for staking operations." (2) https://www.kiln.fi/kiln-responds-tot-infrastructure-issue-with-validator-exit-funds-remain-protected, "PARIS, FRANCE — September 9, 2025": "Kiln today began the orderly exit of all of its Ethereum (ETH) validators", and "The exit process is expected to take between 10 and 30 days depending on the validator" — an operator-side security event that put every ETH client's principal into a multi-week forced exit, which no unbonding table warns you about. (3) The post-mortem at https://www.kiln.fi/post/re-enablement-of-kiln-services-and-security-incident-information, October 7, 2025: a threat actor compromised "a GitHub access token belonging to a Kiln infrastructure engineer", harvested cloud credentials via CI workflows, and "modified the Kiln Connect API backend controller to return a malicious transaction, which one Kiln enterprise customer signed in their custody solution, causing a loss of funds." The malicious transaction "changed the withdrawal authority of the Solana stakes, only if the existing withdrawal authority of the stake account provided in the POST call held stake balances above 150k SOL" — targeted at the largest clients, and the customer's own quorum approved it inside their custody instance. NOTE THE DIVERGENT ATTRIBUTION, which is the single most useful thing here: Kiln places the mitigation duty on the client — "Kiln has consistently recommended that customers decode transactions to verify their integrity before signing", and "Signing and broadcasting a transaction without decoding may result in a loss of authority over stake accounts, as occurred in this case" — while SwissBorg's own primary statement (https://swissborg.com/blog/swissborg-security-update-kiln-breach) puts it on Kiln: "the tampering of the transaction happened within Kiln's infrastructure", and states "no breach occurred within SwissBorg's infrastructure", quantifying the loss at "over 192,000 SOL". The lesson for this category is precise: non-custody protected the keys but not the client, because the attack came through the transaction the operator constructed, and it was not a slashing event — so the Chainproof base layer, whose size Kiln has never published, would not obviously have answered it. Ask for the base coverage limit, what perils it covers beyond slashing, and whether the operator or the client bears an API-origin malicious-transaction loss. Get it in the contract; Kiln's own institutional docs tell you to, saying "For more details and Kiln's coverage please read our T&Cs or the Order Form you have signed with Kiln."LuganodesScore 76Institutional non-custodial validator operator on 40+ networks that is the only member of this pool to name a licensed insurer for slashing — confirmed on the Bermuda Monetary Authority's own register — and state the client pays nothing for it, while publishing a commission figure for just three of those networks (TRON, Sui and Hyperliquid on 2026-09-28), no exit-queue figure for Ethereum at all, and a contract that caps its own liability at the fees it collected.Strength: Slashing indemnity — 9/10Watch-out: Read the Terms of Service before you read anything else, because it contradicts three things the marketing says. (1) The company you would contract with is not the Swiss one on the homepage: https://luganodes.com/terms-of-service opens "These Terms of Service for Boldfit Tech Solutions Ltd. ("Terms") regulate the services provided by Luganodes, a private limited company based in Cayman Islands ("Luganodes")", while https://luganodes.com/faq/ lists "Headquarters Switzerland (Lugano Plan ₿)" and /network/ethereum calls the operation "Swiss-operated"; the Terms then pick Swiss law (8.1, "These Terms are regulated by and construed in line with Swiss substantive law") and assign jurisdiction to "the regular courts of Luganodes" (8.2), which is not a court — Luganodes is the counterparty's own trading name, not a place. (2) The insurance that makes this the strongest indemnity disclosure in the category is nowhere in the contract. The words Chainproof and insurance appear zero times in the Terms; section 4 expressly excludes "slashing penalties" from Luganodes' responsibility, and section 5 caps total liability at "the portion of Service Fees received by Luganodes" from your delegation. The insurer is real and licensed — Chainproof Digital Asset Insurance Ltd appears on the Bermuda Monetary Authority's own regulated-entities register as sector Insurance, Class IIGB — but Chainproof describes its slashing product as "First-party indemnification for validators and institutional stakers", publishes no limit ("meaningful policy limits", "All policies are bespoke"), and does not name Luganodes anywhere on its site. So get the policy number, the limit, and written confirmation that YOU are the beneficiary rather than the validator. (3) Section 6 states the Service Fee "is also available on the Luganodes website" — it is not, for any network except TRON, Sui and, on a Hyperliquid page new since August, Hyperliquid ("3.00%" on 2026-09-28). Ask for your commission per network and your Ethereum exit-queue expectation in the contract; neither is published.
Quick facts
At a glance
2 of 3 rows read the same for both.
FactKilnLuganodes
PricingSnapshotKiln validator docs page "Solana (SOL)" (https://docs.kiln.fi/v1/kiln-products/validators/protocols/solana-sol, fetched 28 September 2026), Mainnet table with columns Name | Commission | MEV commission | Address: Kiln1 — "5%" commission, "100% (offchain rebates & compounding)" MEV commission, vote account DdCNGDpP7qMgoAy6paFzhhak2EeyCZcgjH7ak5u5v28m; Kiln2 — "7%" commission, "7%" MEV commission, vote account HCvnhbT3Sn5RsueDisWzzn5FkW8tAqoQK1dr7cvAVzin. The same page adds: "Each validator commission rate is public and the same for all funds on a given validator. The validator takes its commission automatically when rewards are generated. Your staking rewards are distributed net of the validator commission." These are Solana validator rates only. Of the 26 validator protocol pages Kiln documents, only this page and the NEAR page print a commission figure, https://www.kiln.fi/pricing returns 404, and no institutional contract rate is published.Luganodes' TRON network page (https://luganodes.com/network/tron/, fetched 28 September 2026) answers "What APR can I earn staking TRX with Luganodes?" with: "Luganodes returns 95% of staking rewards to voters at a 5% commission, currently a 3.21% APR. TRON yield comes from block production and voting rewards rather than a fixed rate, so it moves with network conditions. Among institutional TRON staking providers, Luganodes sits at the top of the cohort on both reward share and yield. Last updated: June 2026." The same page's header block reads "5% Flat Commission" and "~3.2% APR". That is the TRON Super Representative rate only. Luganodes prints a rate for just two other networks (Sui on its network directory, Hyperliquid on its new Hyperliquid page); its Ethereum and staking-product pages print no fee, and its Terms say the Service Fee is recorded on-chain and "also available on the Luganodes website".
Asset coverageEditorial——
Region fitSnapshotglobalglobal
From the published criteria
Which should you pick?
Kiln
79#1 of 7
Leads
Pick it when
Pick Kiln if rate transparency matters most — it scores 6/10 to Luganodes's 5/10 there (weight 24).
Strength
Unbonding disclosure — 8/10
Tradeoff
Read all three parts of the September 2025 breach disclosure before you sign, and then ask for the base slashing coverage limit in writing. Kiln itself names the victim. (1) https://www.kiln.fi/post/sol-incident-swissborg---announcement, September 8, 2025: "SwissBorg and Kiln are investigating an incident that may have involved unauthorized access to a wallet used for staking operations... The incident resulted in Solana funds being improperly removed from the wallet used for staking operations." (2) https://www.kiln.fi/kiln-responds-tot-infrastructure-issue-with-validator-exit-funds-remain-protected, "PARIS, FRANCE — September 9, 2025": "Kiln today began the orderly exit of all of its Ethereum (ETH) validators", and "The exit process is expected to take between 10 and 30 days depending on the validator" — an operator-side security event that put every ETH client's principal into a multi-week forced exit, which no unbonding table warns you about. (3) The post-mortem at https://www.kiln.fi/post/re-enablement-of-kiln-services-and-security-incident-information, October 7, 2025: a threat actor compromised "a GitHub access token belonging to a Kiln infrastructure engineer", harvested cloud credentials via CI workflows, and "modified the Kiln Connect API backend controller to return a malicious transaction, which one Kiln enterprise customer signed in their custody solution, causing a loss of funds." The malicious transaction "changed the withdrawal authority of the Solana stakes, only if the existing withdrawal authority of the stake account provided in the POST call held stake balances above 150k SOL" — targeted at the largest clients, and the customer's own quorum approved it inside their custody instance. NOTE THE DIVERGENT ATTRIBUTION, which is the single most useful thing here: Kiln places the mitigation duty on the client — "Kiln has consistently recommended that customers decode transactions to verify their integrity before signing", and "Signing and broadcasting a transaction without decoding may result in a loss of authority over stake accounts, as occurred in this case" — while SwissBorg's own primary statement (https://swissborg.com/blog/swissborg-security-update-kiln-breach) puts it on Kiln: "the tampering of the transaction happened within Kiln's infrastructure", and states "no breach occurred within SwissBorg's infrastructure", quantifying the loss at "over 192,000 SOL". The lesson for this category is precise: non-custody protected the keys but not the client, because the attack came through the transaction the operator constructed, and it was not a slashing event — so the Chainproof base layer, whose size Kiln has never published, would not obviously have answered it. Ask for the base coverage limit, what perils it covers beyond slashing, and whether the operator or the client bears an API-origin malicious-transaction loss. Get it in the contract; Kiln's own institutional docs tell you to, saying "For more details and Kiln's coverage please read our T&Cs or the Order Form you have signed with Kiln."
Luganodes
76#2 of 7
Pick it when
Pick Luganodes if slashing cover matters most — it scores 9/10 to Kiln's 6/10 there (weight 34).
Strength
Slashing indemnity — 9/10
Tradeoff
Read the Terms of Service before you read anything else, because it contradicts three things the marketing says. (1) The company you would contract with is not the Swiss one on the homepage: https://luganodes.com/terms-of-service opens "These Terms of Service for Boldfit Tech Solutions Ltd. ("Terms") regulate the services provided by Luganodes, a private limited company based in Cayman Islands ("Luganodes")", while https://luganodes.com/faq/ lists "Headquarters Switzerland (Lugano Plan ₿)" and /network/ethereum calls the operation "Swiss-operated"; the Terms then pick Swiss law (8.1, "These Terms are regulated by and construed in line with Swiss substantive law") and assign jurisdiction to "the regular courts of Luganodes" (8.2), which is not a court — Luganodes is the counterparty's own trading name, not a place. (2) The insurance that makes this the strongest indemnity disclosure in the category is nowhere in the contract. The words Chainproof and insurance appear zero times in the Terms; section 4 expressly excludes "slashing penalties" from Luganodes' responsibility, and section 5 caps total liability at "the portion of Service Fees received by Luganodes" from your delegation. The insurer is real and licensed — Chainproof Digital Asset Insurance Ltd appears on the Bermuda Monetary Authority's own regulated-entities register as sector Insurance, Class IIGB — but Chainproof describes its slashing product as "First-party indemnification for validators and institutional stakers", publishes no limit ("meaningful policy limits", "All policies are bespoke"), and does not name Luganodes anywhere on its site. So get the policy number, the limit, and written confirmation that YOU are the beneficiary rather than the validator. (3) Section 6 states the Service Fee "is also available on the Luganodes website" — it is not, for any network except TRON, Sui and, on a Hyperliquid page new since August, Hyperliquid ("3.00%" on 2026-09-28). Ask for your commission per network and your Ethereum exit-queue expectation in the contract; neither is published.
Self-identify in 10 seconds
Which one is actually for you?
KilnLeads
Choose Kiln if rate transparency matters most
Rate transparency: 6/10 against 5/10 for Luganodes (weight 24)
Lock-up disclosure: 8/10 against 3/10 for Luganodes (weight 22)
Voting from custody: 7/10 against 6/10 for Luganodes (weight 20)
KilnScore 79The white-label validator operator running under other firms' staking buttons, with 15 named custody-platform integration guides and a per-network lock-up figure published across 26 protocol docs pages (2026-09-28 count) — but a slashing base layer whose size it has never quantified, a commission printed for only two of those 26 networks, and a governance posture stated for two niche products while the Cosmos-family chains where delegated stake actually votes are left silent.Strength: Unbonding disclosure — 8/10Watch-out: Read all three parts of the September 2025 breach disclosure before you sign, and then ask for the base slashing coverage limit in writing. Kiln itself names the victim. (1) https://www.kiln.fi/post/sol-incident-swissborg---announcement, September 8, 2025: "SwissBorg and Kiln are investigating an incident that may have involved unauthorized access to a wallet used for staking operations... The incident resulted in Solana funds being improperly removed from the wallet used for staking operations." (2) https://www.kiln.fi/kiln-responds-tot-infrastructure-issue-with-validator-exit-funds-remain-protected, "PARIS, FRANCE — September 9, 2025": "Kiln today began the orderly exit of all of its Ethereum (ETH) validators", and "The exit process is expected to take between 10 and 30 days depending on the validator" — an operator-side security event that put every ETH client's principal into a multi-week forced exit, which no unbonding table warns you about. (3) The post-mortem at https://www.kiln.fi/post/re-enablement-of-kiln-services-and-security-incident-information, October 7, 2025: a threat actor compromised "a GitHub access token belonging to a Kiln infrastructure engineer", harvested cloud credentials via CI workflows, and "modified the Kiln Connect API backend controller to return a malicious transaction, which one Kiln enterprise customer signed in their custody solution, causing a loss of funds." The malicious transaction "changed the withdrawal authority of the Solana stakes, only if the existing withdrawal authority of the stake account provided in the POST call held stake balances above 150k SOL" — targeted at the largest clients, and the customer's own quorum approved it inside their custody instance. NOTE THE DIVERGENT ATTRIBUTION, which is the single most useful thing here: Kiln places the mitigation duty on the client — "Kiln has consistently recommended that customers decode transactions to verify their integrity before signing", and "Signing and broadcasting a transaction without decoding may result in a loss of authority over stake accounts, as occurred in this case" — while SwissBorg's own primary statement (https://swissborg.com/blog/swissborg-security-update-kiln-breach) puts it on Kiln: "the tampering of the transaction happened within Kiln's infrastructure", and states "no breach occurred within SwissBorg's infrastructure", quantifying the loss at "over 192,000 SOL". The lesson for this category is precise: non-custody protected the keys but not the client, because the attack came through the transaction the operator constructed, and it was not a slashing event — so the Chainproof base layer, whose size Kiln has never published, would not obviously have answered it. Ask for the base coverage limit, what perils it covers beyond slashing, and whether the operator or the client bears an API-origin malicious-transaction loss. Get it in the contract; Kiln's own institutional docs tell you to, saying "For more details and Kiln's coverage please read our T&Cs or the Order Form you have signed with Kiln."
Luganodes
Choose Luganodes if slashing cover matters most
Slashing cover: 9/10 against 6/10 for Kiln (weight 34)
LuganodesScore 76Institutional non-custodial validator operator on 40+ networks that is the only member of this pool to name a licensed insurer for slashing — confirmed on the Bermuda Monetary Authority's own register — and state the client pays nothing for it, while publishing a commission figure for just three of those networks (TRON, Sui and Hyperliquid on 2026-09-28), no exit-queue figure for Ethereum at all, and a contract that caps its own liability at the fees it collected.Strength: Slashing indemnity — 9/10Watch-out: Read the Terms of Service before you read anything else, because it contradicts three things the marketing says. (1) The company you would contract with is not the Swiss one on the homepage: https://luganodes.com/terms-of-service opens "These Terms of Service for Boldfit Tech Solutions Ltd. ("Terms") regulate the services provided by Luganodes, a private limited company based in Cayman Islands ("Luganodes")", while https://luganodes.com/faq/ lists "Headquarters Switzerland (Lugano Plan ₿)" and /network/ethereum calls the operation "Swiss-operated"; the Terms then pick Swiss law (8.1, "These Terms are regulated by and construed in line with Swiss substantive law") and assign jurisdiction to "the regular courts of Luganodes" (8.2), which is not a court — Luganodes is the counterparty's own trading name, not a place. (2) The insurance that makes this the strongest indemnity disclosure in the category is nowhere in the contract. The words Chainproof and insurance appear zero times in the Terms; section 4 expressly excludes "slashing penalties" from Luganodes' responsibility, and section 5 caps total liability at "the portion of Service Fees received by Luganodes" from your delegation. The insurer is real and licensed — Chainproof Digital Asset Insurance Ltd appears on the Bermuda Monetary Authority's own regulated-entities register as sector Insurance, Class IIGB — but Chainproof describes its slashing product as "First-party indemnification for validators and institutional stakers", publishes no limit ("meaningful policy limits", "All policies are bespoke"), and does not name Luganodes anywhere on its site. So get the policy number, the limit, and written confirmation that YOU are the beneficiary rather than the validator. (3) Section 6 states the Service Fee "is also available on the Luganodes website" — it is not, for any network except TRON, Sui and, on a Hyperliquid page new since August, Hyperliquid ("3.00%" on 2026-09-28). Ask for your commission per network and your Ethereum exit-queue expectation in the contract; neither is published.
Criterion by criterion
Scorecard
Published criteria · weight in points of 868 of 8 cells scored. Strength is read from the evidence file; the weight is the published one. Methodology
Slashing cover
by 3 of 10weight 8.2 of 86Luganodes leads
Kiln6/10 out of 10
Luganodes9/10 out of 10
Lock-up disclosure
by 5 of 10weight 5.3 of 86Kiln leads
Kiln8/10 out of 10
Luganodes3/10 out of 10
Rate transparency
by 1 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Kiln leads
Kiln6/10 out of 10
Luganodes5/10 out of 10
Voting from custody
by 1 of 10weight 4.8 of 86Kiln leads
Kiln7/10 out of 10
Luganodes6/10 out of 10
Score dimensions
weights sum to 86
The published score is five dimensions, each weighted for the category. "Published criteria" is the criteria block above; the other four are the engine's own terms — availability, friction, trust record, measured data. Each bar is one side's points out of that dimension's maximum; the weight beside the name is its points of the 86-point weighted total. The published criteria above can fill 24 of the block’s 30. A weight marked “constant here” belongs to a dimension every ranked product in the category holds at the same value: it still counts in the total, and it orders nothing here.
Availabilityweight 20 of 86 · constant here
Kiln14/20Luganodes14/20
Tie
Published criteriaweight 30 of 86
Kiln15.9/30Luganodes14.7/30
Kiln leads
Frictionweight 10 of 86 · constant here
Kiln2.7/10Luganodes2.7/10
Tie
Trust recordweight 8 of 86 · constant here
Kiln3.2/8Luganodes3.2/8
Tie
Measured dataweight 18 of 86 · constant here
Kiln8.3/18Luganodes8.3/18
Tie
Decision rulePublished order
Choose Kiln unless the term Luganodes leads on is the one you are buying.
Pick Luganodes if slashing cover matters most — it scores 9/10 to Kiln's 6/10 there (weight 34).
The published order weighs every criterion the same way for everyone. To weigh them your way, run .
From the published order
Next best action
If this isn't your case
Other matchups worth comparing
How you can lose money here, and what the ranking scores
Control failure: a key or vote changes the rules, freezes or mints.
Scored by Do you keep custody and still get to vote — and who presses the button? · 20% (Kiln 7/10, Luganodes 6/10)
Insolvency failure: the firm or issuer that owes you cannot pay.
Scored by If a validator you delegated to gets slashed, who actually writes the cheque? · 34% (Kiln 6/10, Luganodes 9/10)
Exit failure: you cannot get out at par, on time, or with what is yours.
Scored by How long are the assets locked per network, and did they tell you before you signed? · 22% (Kiln 8/10, Luganodes 3/10)
Not assessed by this ranking: Liveness failure, Custody failure, Regulatory failure, Execution failure, Information failure. A high place says nothing about these; the Methodology tab says what each means.
Also scored, as cost, quality or a summary of several families: Can you find the rate you would actually pay without booking a sales call? (24%).
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Kiln scores 3 points above Luganodes, led by rate transparency, lock-up disclosure, and voting from custody. Published scores, out of 100: Kiln 79 (rank 1 of 7 staking), Luganodes 76 (rank 2 of 7).
Reviewed means both products compared here was read against its sources on or after that date; every ranked category is re-read at least every 45 days. Models research, extract and parse. A deterministic engine ranks. Every quote passes an adversarial refute pass.
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