Staking
To participate in Valdium's consensus you must hold VLD and bond it. There is no mining, no proof-of-work, no way to earn rewards without skin in the game. Your bonded VLD is the credential — and the bigger your bond, the larger your share of block rewards and protocol emission.
Two ways to participate
Staking VLD comes in two shapes. Validating means running a node, signing blocks, and earning the full reward minus your operating costs. Delegating means parking VLD with someone else's validator and earning a share of their rewards in exchange. The math is the same on both sides — the validator role is more work for a slightly higher cut.
What rewards look like
There is no protocol emission and no pre-allocated validator pool — the 1B VLD supply is fixed at the Ethereum launch block and never expands. Validators are paid entirely from transaction fees: 50% of every base fee is paid to the proposer and their delegators (split by stake share), the other 50% is burned. Priority tips go 100% to the proposer.
| Variable | Year-1 testnet figure |
|---|---|
| Total bonded stake (target) | ~60% of supply |
| Annual rewards source | 100% from network fees (no emission) |
| Implied gross staker APR | variable — tracks fee volume |
| Validator commission (typical) | 5-10% |
| Net delegator APR (typical) | ~6.0-6.3% |
APR is variable by design — it tracks how busy the network is. Heavy fee volume + high bond participation = healthy yield for everyone. Low fee volume = lean rewards. There is no inflation backstop; staker income is real economic activity, not new money printed.
The validator path
To run a validator you need:
- Hardware that can keep up — see Hardware Requirements. A modest VPS suffices on testnet.
- A minimum bond: 1,000 VLD on testnet, 32,000 VLD on mainnet at launch (subject to governance).
- A validator key — a Dilithium3 keypair separate from your spending wallet.
- Tolerance for ~99% uptime. Below that, slashing risk grows; below ~95% you're losing money.
The full flow is in Run a Validator and VPS One-Liner. The short version: install, generate key, bond, wait for the next epoch to enter the active set.
The delegator path
Delegating doesn't require hardware or a node. From any wallet that holds VLD:
valdium-cli stake delegate \
--to 0xValidatorAddress... \
--amount 1000or from the desktop app's Stake tab. Pick a validator from the list, enter an amount, sign. Your VLD is now locked in the staking contract earning rewards.
Rewards accrue per block and are auto-claimable; the desktop app and explorer both show your pending claim. There's no compound-or-not toggle — calling claim moves rewards to your spending balance, and you can re-delegate them or move them elsewhere.
Choosing a validator
What to look at:
- Uptime history. The explorer shows missed slots over the last 30 days. Anything above 1% missed is a yellow flag.
- Commission rate. The validator's cut. 5% is typical, 10% is normal, 20% is greedy, 0% is suspicious — running a node costs money, and a 0% commission either means a loss-leader phase or insolvency.
- Total stake. Bigger validators are not better. Concentrating delegation on a handful of validators is bad for the chain. The status page flags overweight validators in red; consider smaller ones with good uptime.
- Self-bond ratio. What fraction of the validator's stake is their own VLD versus delegated. Higher self-bond means the validator's incentives line up with delegators'.
Unbonding
Stake is liquid in principle but has an unbonding period in practice. Once you call undelegate, the VLD sits in a 14-day cooldown before it returns to your balance. During that period you earn no rewards and you can still be slashed for the validator's misbehaviour. After cooldown the VLD lands back in your spending account.
The cooldown exists to make slashing recoverable — a validator caught double-signing yesterday can't have their delegators flee tonight and dodge the penalty.
Slashing
Two events get a validator slashed (and their delegators with them):
| Offence | Slash | Jail |
|---|---|---|
| Double-sign (signed two different blocks at the same height) | 5% of bond | Permanent — tombstoned |
| Downtime (missed > 5% of slots in a window) | 0.01% of bond | Temporary, ~6 hours |
The downtime slash is small enough to be a nudge, not a punishment. The double-sign slash is large because double-signing is either malice or a hardware-replication failure (one key on two hot machines) — both of which the chain must penalise hard. See Slashing for the full set of rules.
Re-delegation
Switching validators without going through the 14-day unbonding cooldown is allowed once per epoch per delegator:
valdium-cli stake redelegate \
--from 0xOldValidator... \
--to 0xNewValidator... \
--amount 1000The stake moves instantly and starts earning under the new validator next block. The rate limit (once per epoch) exists to prevent rapid stake-hopping from gaming reward distribution.
Tax considerations
This is not tax advice and the answer depends on where you live. As a general rule: protocol rewards are taxable income in most jurisdictions at the moment they accrue, even if you don't claim them. Talk to a local accountant before scaling a position.