Staking FAQ
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Staking FAQ
Understanding the Basics
What is the Cooldown period?
When a stake is created, the Committer or Delegator chooses a cooldown length between 28d and roughly 3 years (subject to change). When the user decides to unstake, they trigger the cooldown countdown. Only when the cooldown has ended can they withdraw their staked tokens. During cooldown, the reward weight and vote weight are reduced to 50% of the previous value.
What is the reason for the Cooldown Period to exist?
The cooldown period protects the network from sudden losses of compute capacity. Without it, committers could instantly withdraw their stakes and shut down their hardware, leaving the network vulnerable to instability. The cooldown gives the network time to adjust and allows other providers to fill the gap. It also ensures that committers remain committed to their promise: during cooldown, they must continue maintaining their full committed compute (with full slashing risk) even though their rewards are reduced to 50%. This design discourages impulsive exits and rewards long-term commitment, which is essential for building a reliable, predictable compute network that developers and users can depend on.
What are Risk/Reward Tradeoffs of Staking with Acurast?
Staking with Acurast follows a clear principle: higher commitment equals higher rewards, but also higher risk. Committers who commit more compute, stake larger amounts of tokens, and choose longer cooldown periods earn proportionally greater rewards - but they also face greater slashing penalties if they fail to maintain their committed compute levels. For example, committing 80% of your measured compute yields more rewards than committing 50%, but falling short on that 80% commitment results in larger slashing penalties. Delegators face a similar tradeoff: they can earn staking rewards without running hardware, but they share in their chosen committer's slashing risk. The key is finding the right balance - commit what you can reliably maintain over the long term. Conservative commitments (lower compute percentage, shorter cooldown) offer lower rewards but also lower risk, while aggressive commitments maximize rewards but require consistent, reliable operation of your hardware.
Getting Started with Staking
Why do I only see one slider to Commit Compute, when the four metrics are treated separately anyway?
Even though any stake is basically a separate committement for each of the four of the benchmark pools (CPUs, CPUm, RAM, Storage), the staking frontend only shows one slider for simplicity reasons. For example, if the Committer selects to stake 50% of the measured compute, his stake is a committment to keep up 50% of the compute per Benchmark Metric Pool. Means to upkeep 50% of the CPU Single Core Benchmark Metric, 50% of the CPU Multi Core Benchmark Metric, 50% of the RAM Benchmark Metric and 50% of the Storage Benchmark Metric over the lifetime of the stake.
Why can I only commit 80% of my measured Compute?
The maximum a user can commit is capped at 80% of the currently total measured compute, in order to prevent early Slashings if the Committer's Compute is fluctuating due to processors going offline.
Why can I only stake 999 tokens if I have 1000?
When a user stakes tokens, all of these tokens will be locked and cannot be moved. This means that the users account won't be able to pay for gas fees caused by processors to report heartbeats and deployment execution reports. This would result in a situation where this account won't be able to receive rewards from benchmarks or computation without getting additional tokens. Therefore a safeguard deposit of 1 cACU / ACU was introduced.
What is the maximum of tokens a user can stake?
A committer can stake as much as they want up to the limit defined by their compute metric × the allowed ratio. The higher their benchmark (more or stronger devices), the more stake they can back it with. The committer's own stake cannot exceed some multiple of their compute metric capacity (benchmark score). This prevents someone from locking an enormous amount of ACU behind a tiny phone and unfairly capturing rewards.
Managing Your Stake
Can a stake be reduced while it exists?
No. Once a stake is set up, it can only be extended - by a longer cooldown period, committing more computation, or adding more tokens. None of these parameters can be reduced in an active stake.
How many stakes can a Committer have?
A committer can only have one own stake, but they can delegate one additional stake to themselves and they can delegate unlimited stakes to other committers (one stake per committer), allowing them to create stakes with different cooldown periods and size.
Delegation
How many delegations can a Committer accept?
While the number of delegations is not limited, a committer's delegated stake is limited dynamically by several parameters, in dependence of their current delegations, the state of these delegations and their own staked compute.
What happens to the Delegator's stake when the Committer starts cooldown?
Delegators can only choose a cooldown period that is shorter (never longer) than the selected Committer's cooldown. For example, if the selected Committer choses a cooldown of 6 months and the Delegator chose 2 months, once the Committer starts cooldown, it will take 4 months until the Delegator's cooldown automatically starts as well.
Delegators can see when their Committers start cooldown and can redelegate their stake to a different Committer, regardless of whether their own cooldown period has already started.
What happens to the Delegator's stake when their Committer is slashed?
Delegators are affected by slashing and will lose a pro rata share of their stake if their Committer is slashed. Delegators can choose to redelegate their stake to a different Committer.
Rewards
How much in rewards can a Committer or Delegator expect?
Staking rewards in the Acurast network are dynamic and cannot be precisely predicted in advance, as they depend on the collective behavior of all participants. Your individual rewards are determined by your share of the total network commitmen - calculated from your benchmark scores, stake size, and cooldown duration relative to all other stakers. As more participants join with varying parameters, or as existing participants adjust their commitments, the reward distribution shifts accordingly. Additionally, rewards are split across four separate benchmark metric pools, meaning your performance in each metric directly impacts your share of that pool's rewards.
Once the system goes live and staking activity stabilizes, estimated Annual Percentage Rates (APR) will become available to help participants gauge potential returns. However, the fundamental principle remains: stronger hardware, larger stakes, and longer commitment periods will always yield proportionally higher rewards compared to participants with lower commitment levels.