In order to Stake DEL, you must first have a Decimal Wallet and stock it with some DEL.

To create your wallet go to the Decimal Console here.

Make sure to backup your seed phase in a secure location.

Once inside your wallet, you can fund it with some DEL from popular exchanges like XT, Coinsbit, and P2PB2B.

Inside the console, you can select your Validator and amount to Stake.

For a Step-by-Step guide please view our Decimal Staking Tutorial, coming soon.

Staking DEL can be quite advantageous due to the high inflationary block rewards.

With current levels of block rewards, block times, and circulating supply, users can expect inflation to decrease from the 80% range downwards as of Jan 2022.

When delegating, please take into consideration the fees charged by your selected validators, this will impact your final staking rewards. For a full list of validators, please visit the Decimal Asset Profile.

There are lock-up risks to consider when delegating DEL. When unbonding your Stake from a Validator, you can expect a 30 day cooldown period before the Stake is accessible. The market price could impact your position during this period.

There are also normal slashing or performance risks associated with the validators behavior.

Some of the following risks include two different penalties that punish the masternode (validator) for bad behavior.

There are 2 types of fines:

1% of the total validator stake:

The absence of a validator’s signature in 12 blocks out of the last 24 is penalized with 1% of the total amount of the validator’s stake. Those. if the validator node is in the blockchain in an activated state ( Set Online ), but for some reason has not signed the blocks. For example, due to an unreliable Internet connection. 12 of 24 blocks in any order. The total amount of the stake includes all the funds delegated to this validator and his personal funds.

To prevent this penalty, Decimal has prepared a special service – Decimal Guard . This service monitors the process of signing blocks for a particular node and, if necessary, sends a Set Offline transaction, which deactivates the masternode before it is penalized. The Guard fires at the specified skipped block threshold, which is configurable. The Set Offline transaction is created and signed in advance, and when Guard is triggered, it simply sends it to the network. The next deactivation will require a new transaction stored in Guard.

5% of the total validator stake:

Validators who attempt to cheat in the consensus process are also penalized. Namely, when signing 2 different blocks of the same height during the rounds of verification and voting for a block of candidates. Those. when signing two versions of the same block.

This is a serious violation that can lead to blockchain forks. In the event of a fork, some network users will focus on one version of the blockchain state (transactions, account balances), while the other part of the users will focus on the second version of the blockchain with a different state and balances.

In this case, the validator will be penalized with a 5% penalty. User funds are not decoupled from the penalized validator. But the validator node is forcibly deactivated. To return the node to the validator system and participate in the consensus, the validator must reactivate the node (with the Set Online transaction ).

Important note:

The amount of the fine ( 1% or 5% ) is irretrievably burned, reducing the issue of the corresponding coins.

Rewards and penalties are distributed in proportion to the share of the delegator’s funds in the total validator stake. If the validator receives a 5% penalty, then the delegator will receive the same 5% penalty automatically.

The delegator is personally responsible for his choice of validator, so this choice must be made very carefully.