Polkadot Staking: An Update
Since it went live on May 26, 2020, the Polkadot Network has been dynamically changing as it matures through its launch. Recently, changes have occurred in relation to staking on Polkadot that caused some nominators not to receive their rewards - we are working on a permanent solution and suggest an immediate alternative here.
Polkadot is a Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS) network, designed with the roles of validators and nominators to maximize chain security. The system encourages DOT holders to participate as nominators, but very recently, not all nominators have been receiving rewards.
Why?
Determining which validators are in the active set, and which nominators are nominating them, is a computationally heavy task that results in a very large graph, mapping the nominators to their respective validators. This generated graph is computed off-chain and submitted back to the chain, meaning it must fit in a single block.
This worked well initially, but as the number of nominators grew, blocks took longer to produce than expected and issues with the new weighting became apparent. As the graph must fit in a single block, solutions with so many nominators were getting too large .
As this was causing network instability, the weighting calculation was updated. For more detailed information on this update, see the pull request here.
Note, this issue does not affect the Kusama network, which has fewer nominators than Polkadot.
The immediate remedy
In order to fit the solution into a block, the size must be reduced. There are several good options being considered for a permanent solution, but the immediate fix is to eliminate the smallest nominations (measured in DOT).
The DOT limit is a dynamic amount – it can move up or down every era (24 hours on Polkadot) depending on the nominations and the election solutions. The current minimum can be seen using this community-developed tool or through these scripts which you can run on your machine.
However, this means that for the moment, nominators with a stake smaller than the daily minimum rate will generally not be backing any validator with their stake, and consequently not be receiving staking rewards, as a side effect of the issues above.
The way forward
Developers are working diligently on a fix, which will be implemented as soon as it is available, tested and approved by referendum.
Until more options are available, our current recommendation for those staking with less than the minimum amount who don’t have the opportunity to bond more, is to move to an off-chain staking solution, namely staking on exchanges.
The following exchanges currently offer staking-as-a-service for Polkadot:
Others plan to add staking in the near future.
Keep up to date with daily developments by following the Polkadot Digest on Element, Reddit or Subsocial.
Unfortunately scams are very common in the crypto space. With the growing popularity of Polkadot and Kusama, we are also seeing a rise of imposters trying to scam our community.
In order to protect yourself and reduce the risk of losing your funds, read our comprehensive list of known scams and how to recognize them in our Wiki here.
Updated April 2021
From the blog
Elastic Scaling: Streamlining Growth on Polkadot
Elastic scaling is an extremely useful addition for parachains that need higher throughput than allowed by the current Polkadot protocol. This blog from Fatemeh Shirazi explains its importance and how this technical upgrade will come about. Polkadot’s mission is based on delivering a platform that focuses on excellent scaling and security. The aim is to allow decentralized applications to operate in the best conditions possible. Polkadot scales by applying hierarchy to the platform architectur
JAM Session: Gavin Wood Reveals Bold Vision for Polkadot's Next Revolution
Yesterday at Token 2049 Dubai, Gavin Wood announced a bold vision for the next generation of Polkadot technology. In line with the other groundbreaking firsts that Polkadot has brought to the market, this new vision is set to revolutionize the future of Web3. It will provide the speed, scale, full decentralization, and ease of use needed to drive forward deep innovation across not just Web3, but the entire tech landscape. At the heart of this vision is JAM, a new version of the Polkadot chain t
The landscape of trustless bridges on Polkadot
With research and writing from Oliver Brett, Adrian Catangiu, and Aidan Musnitzky, this article explores the rich environment of bridge building, both within Polkadot and to external ecosystems. Any Web3 protocol with true aspirations of interoperability needs to consider the development and deployment of bridges to external networks, and in this sense Polkadot is no different. Blockchain bridges are, in essence, mechanisms for two sovereign chains with different technological foundations to o