Validators
Validators produce and sign the blocks that make up the Pocket Network chain. They are consensus infrastructure — distinct from Suppliers, which serve relays and earn from relay work. A single organization may run both, but they are separate stakes, separate roles, and separate reward paths.
Pocket runs standard Cosmos SDK staking, unmodified. If you have delegated on any Cosmos chain, the mechanics are familiar. What is not standard is how relay income reaches validators and their delegators — and that difference is the single most misunderstood thing about staking POKT.
Keplr’s “Claim” button does not show your validator earnings. Your real rewards are paid straight to your wallet with no claim step. The claimable figure in Keplr is a small, unrelated inflation residue. See What Keplr Gets Wrong below.
The Active Set
Any number of validators may register and stake, but only the top 21 by total bonded stake are in the active set — the ones that actually sign blocks and earn. Total bonded stake means self-bond plus everything delegated to them.
The set is recalculated at the end of every block. Any stake change — a new delegation, an undelegation, a new validator joining, a jailing — can reshuffle it. A validator that rises above the lowest active one takes its place in the next block, and the displaced validator becomes inactive.
Inactive validators are not slashed and not removed. They keep their stake, keep accepting delegations, and re-enter the moment their stake carries them back into the top 21.
Browse the live set at explorer.pocket.network/validators, which shows every registered validator with stake, status, and commission. You can also query it directly:
pocketd query staking validators --network=mainmax_validators is governance-controlled and read live on this page. To confirm it yourself at any time, run pocketd query staking params --network=main or check explorer.pocket.network/params.
How Validator Rewards Are Generated
Validator income on Pocket comes from relay settlement, not from block production.
Every time a Supplier’s claim settles on-chain, the settlement is split among network participants by governance-controlled percentages. The validator pool’s share is 14% of each Mint=Burn settlement.
That pooled amount is then distributed as follows:
- Split across every bonded validator by stake weight — not paid to whichever validator proposed the block. A validator with 10% of total bonded stake receives 10% of the pool, whether or not it proposed anything.
- Passed through to delegators proportionally. Each delegator’s share is
pool × (your bonded stake ÷ total bonded stake). - Paid directly to each wallet at session settlement, as a bank transfer from the tokenomics module.
The governance parameter is named proposer, which is misleading. It sets the size of the validator pool; it does not mean the block proposer receives it. Distribution is purely stake-weighted across all bonded validators.
Commission Does Not Apply to Settlement Income
This surprises people coming from other Cosmos chains. A validator’s commission rate is applied to rewards flowing through the Cosmos distribution module — inflation and transaction fees. It is not applied to relay settlement income, which is distributed to delegators by stake weight before any commission logic runs.
On Pocket, the network-wide minimum commission is 0%, and the consensus proposer bonuses are both zero (base_proposer_reward and bonus_proposer_reward). Commission is therefore a much weaker signal when choosing a validator than it would be elsewhere. Uptime matters more — see Delegation.
Why Inflation Is Not the Story
Pocket’s other reward path, the global mint, allocates 0% to validators. Under PIP-41 the network settles on a Mint=Burn basis, so essentially all validator income arrives through the settlement distribution above.
What Keplr Gets Wrong
Keplr — and any wallet reading the standard Cosmos staking screen — shows a Claim or Claimable rewards figure. On most Cosmos chains that number is your staking income. On Pocket it is not.
| Where it lives | What it is | |
|---|---|---|
| Your actual earnings | Already in your wallet balance | Relay settlement, paid directly at each session end. No claim step. Nothing accrues waiting for one. |
| Keplr’s “Claimable” | Cosmos distribution module | Minimum inflation only. Cosmos cannot set emissions to zero, so a trivial amount accumulates here until claimed. |
The gap is not subtle. A delegator with roughly 8.9M POKT bonded earned about 134,000 POKT over 30 days, while their claimable balance sat near 1,800 POKT — a difference of about 74×.
Claiming that balance is harmless, and the tokens are real. It is simply not your staking income, and treating it as such will understate your returns by orders of magnitude.
Do not evaluate a validator, or your own returns, using Keplr’s claimable figure. Use the explorer’s delegation view below, which reads settlement events directly.
Seeing Your Real Earnings
Pocket Explorer reads settlement events straight from chain data. Open your account and switch to the delegation view:
https://explorer.pocket.network/account/<your-pokt1-address>?as=delegationIt reports Delegated, Earned 30d, Daily Avg 30d, and APR 30d, with four tabs:
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Validators | Every validator you are bonded to, and how much with each |
| Settlements | Per-block reward events — the ground truth for what you were paid |
| Rate | Daily average and APR, plus exactly how they were derived |
| Raw | The underlying staking and distribution records from the Cosmos LCD |
The explorer deliberately excludes the claimable inflation balance from Earned, the daily average, and the APR, so those figures reflect settlement income only.
The APR shown is backward-looking — it annualizes what these validators actually paid over the window, not a promised rate. Because Cosmos staking messages are not indexed, a delegation whose size changed mid-window cannot be corrected for and will skew both the daily average and the APR.
Where to Go Next
- Delegation — delegate POKT with Keplr or
pocketd, choose a validator, redelegate, and unbond - Validator Setup — run your own validator node
- Tokenomics — how the settlement split fits the wider POKT economy
- Explorer & Analytics — the full explorer guide
In this section
Delegation
Delegate POKT to a validator with Keplr or pocketd — how to choose a validator, what commission actually affects, redelegation, unbonding, and jailing risk.
Learn more →Validator Setup
Run a validator on Pocket Network — prerequisites, key generation and backup, validator.json, create-validator, verification, and jailing recovery.
Learn more →