ranking staking options for the under-50-SOL crowd (since every guide out there is written for whales)

I keep reading staking guides that are clearly aimed at people with 500+ SOL. Here's how I see the options for people holding smaller amounts.

NOT STAKING

At 20 SOL and 7% APY you're earning $0.88/day. The effort of picking a validator and monitoring it is arguably not worth that. This is why millions of wallets don't stake. Honestly kind of a rational choice if your time is worth anything.

NATIVE STAKING (Phantom/Solflare)

Safe, simple, boring. Your SOL gets delegated to a validator through Solana's native staking. Nothing sits in a smart contract. The problem at small amounts is the rewards are basically rounding errors in your portfolio. Good for people who want to set and forget and don't care about squeezing out more.

LIQUID STAKING (Jito, Marinade, Blaze)

Extra 1-2% from MEV plus you get a liquid token for DeFi. The tradeoff is your SOL gets deposited into a protocol smart contract and you hold a derivative token. If you're not actually deploying that derivative into lending or LPs then you're carrying smart contract risk and depeg risk for not much benefit. Makes more sense the bigger your bag is and the more active you are in DeFi.

PREMIUM STAKING (Tramplin)

Your SOL gets delegated to validators through native Solana staking, same as Phantom. No wrapper token, no smart contract holding your SOL. Rewards get pooled and redistributed so sometimes you get more than your proportional cut. Based on how UK premium bonds work. Still new in crypto so the track record is short. Good fit if you want native-level security for your SOL but find proportional staking returns too tiny to care about.

How I'd rank these for a 20 SOL bag personally:

1. Premium staking (the payout actually feels like something) 2. Native staking (if you just want zero complexity) 3. Sitting on it (valid if you're trading actively anyway) 4. Liquid staking (overkill and unnecessary risk at this size)

This is just how I see it. What would you change?