Here are some fun facts about staking Polkdadot and Kusama.
You can nominate up to 16 validators with Polkadot, 24 validators with Kusama
The network will elect validators to be part of the active validator set based on the nominations they have received
Only DOT or KSM selected to be in the active set for a validator earn staking rewards
Generally the network will assign your entire staked amount to ONE of the validators in your nomination set at a time (the exception is for very large holdings which must be split across multiple validators)
A new active validator set is elected every era (on Polkadot, an era is 24 hours; on Kusama, an era is 6 hours)
This means you can expect to earn staking rewards from ONE of your validators per era
The active validator set on Polkadot is currently 500 validators, on Kusama it is 1000 validators.
Recent increases in the number of active Polkadot validators has caused shifts in how nominations are allocated to validators
There are over 1000 Polkadot validators competing to be in the active set, and over 2200 Kusama validators competing to be in the active set.
In most cases, the best strategy is to pick a full set of 16 or 24 validators to increase the likelihood that at least one of your nominees is in the active set at all times, increasing the chances that you will consistently earn staking rewards
Staking rewards are paid by the network (not by validators)
Staking DOT or KSM validators does not give the validator any custody of your tokens.
You may have heard of "slashing", which is an automated event intended to discourage or punish attacks on the network. Slashing is the reduction of staked balances by the network in response to outages, duplicate block generation, or other harmful behavior. While this may sound scary, the reality is that slashing events are uncommon, and the amount of slash is proportional to the perceived threat to the network. In general, as a nominator, you do not have to worry much about slashing as long as you are picking reputable validators.
Validators keep a percentage of your staking reward -- the percent is set by the operator and can be from 1% to 100% on Polkadot, or 10% to 100% on Kusama.
The commission is paid to the validator operator to cover the costs of operating a validator.
Many validators do charge 100% commission. These are generally privately operated validators. You will not get staking rewards from nominating them.
We would love for you to select ValidOrange validators as part of your nomination set.
Our validators have the lowest commissions permitted by the network.
Valid Orange LLC is a USA-based validator operator.
You can follow ValidOrange by joining our Telegram channel (https://t.me/validorange) to get notifications of any announcements from us.
Here are the two ValidOrange Kusama validators:
VALIDORANGE/KSM1:
J47U9wGuwzccFPoz8bnMTKJt7WGpPp8ZNgvtXFDL9PHwpCt
VALIDORANGE/KSM2:
DiSdjgV1fEu2i5wzxerBuuAWpypUQjAbt8WgLYWMZT4PGHj
Both validators run on dedicated servers located in professional, carrier-neutral data centers. Spare equipment and automated tools are set up so that a validator can be quickly moved to a new server if a hardware failure occurs.
Best practices are followed to ensure security of the validators, including keeping systems patched, firewall protection, restricted access, monitoring and alerting, and more.
Stake with ValidOrange!