Original title: “Recent Status of Polkadot Staking: Staking under 35 DOT is recommended on exchanges”
Since its launch on May 26, 2020, as the Polkadot network continues to mature and improve, it has undergone dynamic changes. Recently, there have been some changes related to staking on Polkadot, which caused some nominees to be unable to get rewards -we are working on a permanent solution and propose an immediate alternative here .
Polkadot is a nominated proof-of-stake (NPoS) network. The role of validator and nominator is designed to maximize the security of the chain. The system encourages DOT holders to participate as nominees, but recently, not all nominees have been rewarded.
Why is this happening?
Determining which validators are in the active set and which nominators are nominating them is a computationally intensive task, resulting in very large graphs that map the nominators to their respective validators. The generated graph is calculated outside the chain and submitted back to the chain, which means it must fit a single block.
Initially, this method worked well, but as the number of nominees increased, it took longer than expected to generate blocks, and the problem of new weighting became apparent. Since the graphics must fit into a single block, the solution with too many nominees becomes too big.
Since this can cause network instability, the weight calculation has been updated. For more details about this update, please visit here.
Please note that this issue will not affect the Kusama network , which only has about 1,000 nominees, while Polkadot has about 6,500 nominees.
Immediate remedy
In order to adapt the solution to a block, the size must be reduced. There are several good options for a permanent solution, but the immediate solution is to eliminate (measured by DOT) the smallest nomination .
The DOT limit is a dynamic amount-it can go up and down based on the nomination and election resolution. Just after the weighting calculation, its value is 200 DOT. Further reconfiguration of the network weight parameter increases this value to 35 DOT . However, this means that currently there are less than about 10 nominators. 35 DOT (the actual number may vary) usually does not use their stake to support any validators. This is why people with staking less than 35 DOT are currently not receiving staking rewards, which is a side effect of the above-mentioned problems.
Future plan
Developers are working hard on the patch, which will be implemented as soon as it is available, tested, and approved by the referendum.
At the same time, the Web3 technical education team is thinking of workarounds for users.
Until there are no more options available, our current recommendation for people who use less than 35 DOT for staking and cannot bind more DOT is to adopt an off-chain mortgage solution, that is, staking on an exchange .
Currently, the following exchanges provide staking services for Polkadot:
Kraken: https://support.kraken.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037682011-Overview-of-On-chain-Staking-on-Kraken
**Huobi: https://www.huobiwallet.com/en/staking
MXC: https://www.mxc.com/
**Kucoin: https://www.kucoin.com/
Other exchanges plan to add staking functions in the near future.
After determining the workaround, we will add it to the Polkadot Wiki and knowledge base, and announce it in the Polkadot summary on Element. Any other source cannot be considered as coming from the Web3 Foundation and may be a scam.
