You need to consider these points when choosing a validator:

• Voting Power

In order to support the decentralization and security of the Umee network, it’s important that voting power is evenly distributed between validators. Community members are encouraged to delegate to validators who hold less voting power – often found outside the top 25.

• Participation

It’s important to delegate to a validator that actively participates in governance and shares a similar outlook as you, so you can count on them to vote in your best interest if you ever fail to vote on time.

• Uptime

Community members should only delegate to validators with a high uptime percentage.

• Commission

Between 5% & 10% is typically a fair commission rate for the services provided.

• Self-Bonded

A validator’s self bonded percentage represents the amount of tokens a validator has delegated to themselves. This is a good indicator of whether a validator has “skin in the game” or not.

The live staking APR can be viewed at the top of this page.

There main risks are slashing risks and the 14 day lockup period.

Umee is a cross chain DeFi hub that interconnects between blockchains.

As a base layer blockchain, applications and money lego primitives can be built on top of Umee to access cross chain leverage and liquidity. The Umee Blockchain facilitates interoperability between the Cosmos ecosystem, Ethereum network, side chain architectures, layer two scaling solutions, and alternative base layer protocols. As a Cosmos SDK blockchain, Umee is interoperable with blockchains including Terra, Crypto.com, Binance Chain, Osmosis, Secret Network, and 30+ other chains, plus Ethereum, from Day 1.

The native UMEE token is a Proof of Stake asset that can exist as a Cosmos SDK token and an ERC20 token on Ethereum.

Umee was created to address three main issues that exist in DeFi:

1. Detached Yields
2. Concentrated Systematic Risks
3. Isolated Capital

Umee plans to break the inherent silos between blockchains by utilizing bridging solutions towards interconnecting blockchains and encouraging better capital efficiency. The eventual goals will be to enable interchain lending and borrowing, multi-chain staking and delegations, plus cross chain defi rates.

The UMEE token will exist in both ERC20 and Cosmos SDK format. If users want to convert from one blockchain to another, all they need to do is to go to the Umee Application page and use the convert function through Umee’s gravity bridge; such transactions will take sub minutes. Find more details here

UMEE tokens are used to pay for network fees on the Umee blockchain, to provide Proof of Stake consensus to the Umee network, and for protocol governance. You can read more about UMEE token uses in Umee’s documentation

You can read up more about the tokenomics here.