This article answers some of the most common questions about staking. It uses the Polkadot-JS UI as a reference for specific actions, but you can also use the new Staking Dashboard that makes staking much easier. You can check our extensive article list to help you get started.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

How to nominate directly on Polkadot?


Thanks for considering staking your DOT and nominating to help secure the Polkadot network and its parachains. Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS) success relies on well-informed nominators. To directly submit your intent to stake on Polkadot, you should:


  • Have an account on a non-custodial wallet that supports staking. If you are a beginner, check out this guide on creating an account, which includes a video tutorial.
  • Have more DOT than the minimum intention threshold. This is a strict threshold decided by the chain protocol, which is currently 250 DOT.
  • Bond and nominate your DOT to validators who are accepting nominations (you can choose up to 16). Read this article on how to choose validators.

‼️ IMPORTANT

To earn rewards, you'll also need to be above the dynamic nomination minimum, which you can find on the Targets page.


You will earn rewards when your stake is applied to one or multiple validators that enter the active set through NPoS election, which comes into effect in the next era. See this guide to learn how to securely stake your tokens using Polkadot-JS UI, or watch the video below:



If you choose to stake through custodial services like central exchanges, the steps will differ from the above. By staking through the custodial services, you place your trust in them to act in the best interests of you and the network. Make sure you thoroughly read the terms and conditions to understand the risks associated with the respective custodial staking service. (Not your keys, not your tokens!)


When do I get slashed?


Slashing will happen if a validator misbehaves (e.g., mishandles session keys, attacks the network, or runs modified software) in the network. The validator and its nominators will get slashed by losing a percentage of their staked DOT. By choosing to nominate reliable validators, you can minimize the risk of slashing and earn rewards for securing the network. Learn more about slashing here.

ℹ️ GOOD TO KNOW

If a validator goes offline for a prolonged period of time, they will be forcefully chilled (stop validating), but they won't get slashed. A slashing occurs for offline status only if at least 10% of all validators are offline at the same time.


Why am I not receiving staking rewards?


If you do not see staking rewards on your account, it could be due to any of the below reasons. Please also see this article on what to know before staking, as well as detailed steps.


Delayed staking reward payout


The staking reward distribution is not automatic and needs to be triggered through a transaction. Typically, the validators trigger the staking reward payout transaction, but if they do not, you can claim the rewards manually.


Nominated validators not in the active set


If none of the validators you nominated made it to the active set in an era, you will not earn any rewards for that era. To maximize your chance of earning staking rewards on every era, consider nominating multiple validators (up to 16 on Polkadot).


Nominated a validator with 100% commission


When you nominate a validator that takes 100% commission on staking rewards, you will not receive any staking rewards for the eras when your nomination is applied to that specific validator.


Minimum Active nomination threshold is not met


With the bags-list implementation, the minimum stake threshold to earn staking rewards can change with each era. Do not confuse this with the minimum intention threshold (250 DOT) required to submit your intention to nominate. The network can reward at most 22,500 nominators in any given era. If you nominate with, say, 300 DOT, you are not guaranteed to be part of the top 22,500, and hence you may not earn staking rewards. The entry barrier to being an electing nominator is now determined dynamically based on the stake of the 22,500th nominator.


The nominator intentions serve as a waitlist for the electing subset (22,500), which receives rewards in each era. Having more nominator intentions than the electing subset allows for the dynamic staking system to have some flexibility. For example, assume the top 1000 nominators all unbond their stake; having that extra buffer of nomination intentions becomes useful.


‼️ IMPORTANT

If you are above the dynamic minimum and you are still not receiving staking rewards, check this support article on how to remedy that by repositioning your account in your bag.


Can I nominate and get rewards with less than the minimum?


Yes! Polkadot's staking system is among the most complex in the blockchain ecosystem. The relay chain's validator set is securing not just the state transition of the relay chain itself but also a potentially large number of parallel chains, or parachains for short. Since security is its main goal, Polkadot has been designed with a complex and strict staking system, optimized for locking the most amount of tokens at stake while spreading that stake as evenly as possible to maximize decentralization - all to effectively minimize the possibility of the validator set becoming compromised.


With the current implementation, the optimal election solution of the complex graph of nominator and validator mappings needs to be evaluated within a single block execution time on the Polkadot network. Based on the network benchmarks, 22,500 is chosen as a conservative estimate for the maximum number of nominators in the staking election solution. As maximizing the total stake on the network is one of the key objectives, this mechanism favors the nominators with higher stakes.


To provide a solution for accounts excluded from the election set Nomination Pools were created. They allow members to permissionlessly pool their funds together and act as a single nominator. The minimum to join a nomination pool is 1 DOT. You can learn how to join one in this article.


Will my stake equally back each validator I nominate?


As a nominator on Polkadot, you can nominate up to 16 validators (and up to 24 validators on Kusama). By the end of each era, the Nominated Proof of Staking (NPoS) system takes the validator preferences from all the nominators on the network and "assigns" their stake to the active validators of the next era. 


Unless you are staking with a very large amount, in each era, you will be actively nominating only a single validator with your entire stake and receiving rewards from that validator. The other nominators you've selected will be either inactive or waiting. You can see these under "Network" > "Staking" > "Accounts" on Polkadot-JS UI, and you can learn more about what each state means in this article. You can also read this wiki article for a more in-depth explanation.