The Growth of the Helium Network
HNT staking has been enabled for Validators on Mainnet!
Validators are a new entity on the Helium Blockchain that perform the work of the consensus group including verifying transactions and adding new blocks to the blockchain.
To activate validators on Mainnet requires a minimum of 100 validator nodes with no maximum cap. A separate chain variable will be activated when the proposed minimum is reached which will enable Consensus Group election from the validator pool.
The stake amount is 10,000 HNT.
If an owner decides to unstake a validator, the stake amount is returned after a 250,000 block cooldown period (approximately 5 months). During this period validators do NOT earn rewards.
No. There is no advantage for staking more than 10K HNT per validator node.
-The validator pool is allocated 6% of overall HNT rewards for consensus group work. For an individual validator, it depends on the number of validators in the pool and how often a validator is chosen by the network to participate in the consensus group. Roughly speaking, if there are X validators pre-halving there should be 300,000 HNT/X rewards in a month (50k blocks) per validator assuming good group performance on the part of all validators. Rewards are sent to a validator owner’s wallet at the end of each epoch (approximately every 30 blocks).
Per HIP 51, Validators will create Challenges on behalf of Hotspots, receiving 0.9% of HNT emitted per epoch.
No, but poorly performing validator nodes (offline, weak network connections) will be penalized and earn less rewards. More information about penalties found here. Validator node behavior will be monitored to determine if slashing is needed in a future release.
