With staking, you buy a cryptocurrency in order to lock it up (stake it) in a smart contract. Once your stake is locked up, you vote to approve transactions (in our case, you don’t actually have to “vote” – it happens automatically). In exchange for approving valid transactions, the network of the cryptocurrency rewards the staker with a staking reward.
A percentage of the staking rewards are used to cover the costs of operating the validator node hosting infrastructure and to keep it secure. We retain 10% of the rewards for that purpose.
Staking cryptocurrencies is an efficient way to earn passive income while participating in the world of digital currencies. Staking is much easier than mining or trying to time potential airdrops to accrue coins. We only support non-custodial delegation, where we have no control over your assets. In practice, you are locking your tokens on a smart contract which grants us only working right, but no transfer right. In other words, your assets remain yours at all times. In case of misbehaviour by a validator operator, part of all delegated tocken can be slashed (destroyed). Therefore it is imperative that you delegate your token to a validator you trust.
Validators run the infrastructure: Validators, like Cros-nest, are special blockchain nodes responsible for the provision of infrastructure as well as proposing and validating new blocks and appending them to the blockchain. Hence, together with other validators, they ensure the blockchains’ security by monitoring its accuracy, establishing validity, guaranteeing availability, and provisioning the infrastructure for it to run on. Validators earn staking rewards & fees: For their work, validators are rewarded in the form of block rewards & transaction fees. In order to participate in securing the network and to be paid for this service, validators are required to lock up collateral “stake” which can be forfeited (i.e. “slashed”) programmatically if their actions break the programmatic rules that define the blockchain protocol which they secure.